Emotional regulation and coping in assistive/social robots

While a simple system modeling emotions can make a robot show believable emotions, it can also exhibit socially questionable or unacceptable emotions, like greeting a visitor while being visibly angry.
Humans solve this problem by regulating their emotions with regard to the current situation and coping with negative emotions.
This thesis implements a simple rule-based system for emotion regulation and coping for the RicBot robot from the HelloRic student project, which will allow the robot to regulate which emotion is appropriate for the given situation and be able to take actions to cope with negative or extreme emotions.

The system was validated with an online study in which one interaction scenario with the extented system was shown and one baseline scenario without the extension.
The study measured the perceived social acceptability, the perveiced believability of the shown emotions and the interaction preference of the participants.
The results do not show a significant difference between the two conditions for all hypothesis, but individual interactions with participants gave interesting insights that could be explored in future work.