“Slow to respond, disobedient, could be because it’s mad or stupid.” “Sharp movements but not always very coordinated, seems incompliant but bold.”

This table shows how those personality profiles manifested themselves in the drones’ behavior: For the initial testing in this paper, they decided not to use the Sneaky Spy Drone, leaving them with three personality profiles. The researchers took these eight personality types for drones, and distilled them down to just four: the Exhausted Drone, the Anti-Social Drone, the Adventurer Hero Drone, and the Sneaky Spy Drone. A grumpy drone may require you to repeat commands, while a sad drone flies low to the ground. For example, a drone with a brave personality moves quickly and smoothly, and if you ask it to go backwards, it’ll instead turn around and go forwards. These personalities include: brave, dopey, sleepy, grumpy, happy, sad, scared, and shy. Jessica Cauchard, have established an “emotional model space” for drones, which consists of a set of eight emotional states (personalities) that have defining characteristics that can be easily recognized by human users, and that can be accurately represented through simple actions that the drone can perform. Researchers from Stanford University, led by Dr. Or if it receives a command that it doesn’t understand, it could look “confused.” Again, the drone could communicate these states more directly by using a display on a controller, but especially for a flying robot that you want to keep your eyes on, exhibiting emotions in this way could be an effective form of communication. There’s also fear: a drone could look “scared” when it’s been commanded to fly outside of the range of its controller. Tiredness (sluggish movement or latency in responding to commands) to indicate low battery is a straightforward one. Depending on the situation, expressing your tiredness through actions might be more effective than just saying it, like if you don’t want to be noisy about it, or if you need to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak your language.įor drones, there are all kinds of ways in which emotional expressions like these could be useful.

You could communicate something like “I am tired” to other people by telling them, or you could do it by acting tired: moving slowly, yawning a lot, and closing your eyes. Why would anyone want a drone with the ability to express emotions? Emotional expression is, essentially, a way of communicating information.

The latest contribution to this area is a fascinating paper being presented at the HRI conference on “Emotion Encoding in Human-Drone Interaction.” In other words, how you can program a recognizable personality into a drone. The majority of the research in this field focuses on how humans interact with social robots, including home robots, commercial robots, and educational robots and toys, but odds are, if you personally own a robot, it’s going to be either a vacuum or a drone.Īs drones have become more and more pervasive over the last few years, HRI research on them has been expanding.

In fact, there’s a whole field for it called HRI (Human-Robot Interaction), with its own flagship conference (that IEEE co-sponsors) going on right now in New Zealand. There’s been a lot of research on how humans interact with robots.

Emotion drone chinese