An Artificial Behavioral Immune System for cognitive robotics

The paper proposes the implementation of an artificial be- havioral immune system (ABIS) that could be integrated on a robotic platform. The ultimate goal is to have a form of per- ceptual processing to create the sensation of disgust (on more in general of discomfort) that may influence the behavior that is determined by the cognitive modules. The present work, being oriented to human-robot interaction, is focused on per- ceptual processing of facial expression, and speech recogni- tion. As regards the first aspect, the human face closer to the robot is detected, then facial features are extracted, and finally a vector of data which has an emotional valence linked to ex- pression is determined. The speech is processed to recognize the individual words and the moods using a "sentiment anal- ysis" technique. An artificial immune system is used to rec- ognize positive and negative "feelings" that cames from in- teractions and generate the signal of discomfort. For training and validation we used a few human subjects and sequences of a fairy tale.