On Dec. 18, 2020, WEBO (We Robot), an emo robot developed by the Affective Computing Research Team, made his first appearance in an undergraduates’ classroom, drawing the attention of all the students. The robot is blue and white, two colors characteristic of China University of Geosciences, with a geological hammer on his head, and logos of both the university and the School of Automation on his front.
Ms. Min Li, a graduate student of the research team, briefed about the functions, design scheme and user interface. WEBO is capable of multi-modal emotion recognition, phonetic recognition, and automatic tracking and obstacle avoidance, among which multi-modal emotion recognition is the key technology. There are two systems used, including Matlab multi-modal affective recognition and Python multi-modal affective recognition, both based on human facial expressions, phonetic sounds and hand gestures, to recognize seven fundamental emotions of single modal affective features as well as multi-modal affective features by integrating all the affective characteristics.
Mr Kuanlin Wang, another graduate student then demonstrated the robot’s functions of voice conversation, autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance.
After the introductions, the students started “face-to-face” communications with WEBO until after the class ended. They then had a group photo with WEBO.
Students are equipped with the fundamental knowledge of affective features, affective recognition methods, world renowned emo robots in the class of Intelligent Robot Technologies, and WEBO’s entering the classroom ignited great interest of students to explore more in the field of emo robots.
The Affective Computing Research Team will continue with their research in multi-modal multi-dimensional affective intentions interpretations, and concentrate on harmonious and fluent human-robot interactions.
