Collaborative task assignment of interconnected, affective robots towards autonomous healthcare assistant

Emotion renders the behavior and decision-making more autonomous, intelligent and diversified. How to deal with the cooperation of affective robots is a new research field and is explored in the applications for healthcare and education This paper studies the interaction of affective robots in a cooperative system. We build a model of personality and emotion, and map the personality to behavior and devise emotional interactions. For personalized multi-robot systems, we propose an algorithm of pursuit task allocation based on emotional contagion (PTA-EC). Our experimental results based on simulations demonstrate that the greatest contribution among all types of robots to a group is the frank type, while the sympathetic and the indifferent robots have little effect to the group progress. In addition, it is shown that the emotional contagion positively impacts task allocation and the efficiency of the proposed algorithm is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.