An Emotional Cat Robot

Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe that by introducing emotional variables to the decision-making process, they should be able to create more-natural human and computer interactions. "We don't really believe that computers can have emotions, but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical reasoning," says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. By bestowing intelligent agents with similar emotions, researchers hope that robots can then emulate this humanlike reasoning, he says. The hardware for the robot, called iCAT, was developed by the Dutch research firm Philips and designed to be a generic companion robotic platform. By enabling the robot to form facial expressions using its eyebrows, eyelids, mouth, and head position, the researchers are aiming to let it show if it is confused, for example, when interacting with its human user.