Emotional Robots : Humanoid NAO + Microsoft Emotion API

Emotional robots was part of a research project in AI and IoT aiming to extend emotion awareness to robotic assistances such as Alexa. NAO is a robotic humanoid developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French robotic company headquartered in Paris. We used the NAO as an example of an autonomous robotic butler agent that would support users during their interaction with an IoT enabled home. Interactions such as using voice commands for opening the lights or blinds, or opening the air conditioning. The NAO was used to embody the home agent, with a twist. We connected the NAO to Microsoft Emotion API via REST interface, as we extracted the images from the NAO cameras, send it for analysis on MS Emotion API servers and received analysis of for the scene such as the number of peoples the NAO is seeing and the different emotions exhibited in this scene per individual.

This allowed us to be able to code different reactions of the NAO based on emotions exuded by the users, as well, as being able to recognize their owner and their reactions in comparison to other emotions by other people in the room.