A social robot should be able to understand human’s profile (i.e., human’s emotions and personality), so as to make the robot able to behave appropriately to the multimodal interaction context. This research addresses the online recognition of emotions based on a new fuzzy-based methodology. It also focuses on investigating how could a match between the human’s and the robot’s personalities influence interaction. Furthermore, it studies the automatic generation of head-arm metaphoric gestures under different emotional states based on the prosodic cues of the interacting human. The conducted experiments have been validated with NAO robot from Aldebaran Robotics and ALICE robot from Hanson Robotics.

In this paper, we highlight the usage of AI in software development process for Robotic systems, in general and HRI systems, in particular. The software as well as the software development methodology and associated tools are knowledge-based systems. The key challenge is to represent domain knowledge that enables the process and model evolution to built complex software intensive HRI systems.