Sentiment-based Engagement Strategies for intuitive Human-Robot Interaction

Emotion expressions serve as important communicative signals and are crucial cues in intuitive interactions between humans. Hence, it is essential to include these fundamentals in robotic behavior strategies when interacting with humans to promote mutual understanding and to reduce misjudgements. We tackle this challenge by detecting and using the emotional state and attention for a sentiment analysis of potential human interaction partners to select well-adjusted engagement strategies. This way, we pave the way for more intuitive human-robot interactions, as the robot's action conforms to the person's mood and expectation. We propose four different engagement strategies with implicit and explicit communication techniques that we implement on a mobile robot platform for initial experiments.