The Feelix Growing project aims to design and build a series of
robots that can interact with humans on an emotional level, and
actually adapt their behavior in response to emotional cues from
their human counterparts. The official goal of the project is to
conduct "interdisciplinary investigation of socially situated
development ... as a key paradigm towards achieving robots that
interact with humans in their everyday environments in a rich,
flexible, autonomous, and user-centered way." To achieve this,
the 2.3 million-Euro effort has assembled more than two dozen
roboticists, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists
from six nations. The robots used in the project are simple
designs, including some "off-the-shelf" models. The complexity
lies in the software, which will construct artificial neural
networks to pick up on human emotions exhibited via facial
expressions, voice intonation, gestures and other behaviors. The
leader of the European Commission-funded project, Dr. Lola
Canamero is a senior lec