Markov Decision Process for Emotional Behavior of Socially Assistive Robot

This paper presents a Markov decision process based model for a socially assistive robot. Problem addressed by the model is one to one correspondence of a robot with a human where robot has to convince the human about completing certain tasks. In this regard, emotions of the human and those of the robot are incorporated in the model. Furthermore, emotion transition probabilities and probabilities of robot being able to successfully convince the human are also incorporated. The resulting model however involves large state space. Computational complexity involved in calculation of optimal decision policy from the proposed model is discussed. Consequently, a computational complexity reduction technique is proposed that uses decomposition of the tasks to be performed into sub groups. An online learning framework is also proposed to account for un-modeled parameters in the problem. Behavior of decision making optimal policy obtained from the proposed model has been demonstrated with the help of a simulation based case study.