Development and Testing of a Multimodal Acquisition Platform for Human-Robot Interaction Affective Studies

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies have recently received increasing attention in various fields, from academic communities to engineering firms and the media. Many researchers have been focusing on the development of tools to evaluate the performance of robotic systems and studying how to extend the range of robot interaction modalities and contexts. Because people are emotionally engaged when interacting with computers and robots, researchers have been focusing attention on the study of affective human-robot interaction. This new field of study requires the integration of various approaches typical of different research backgrounds, such as psychology and engineering, to gain more insight into the human-robot affective interaction.