This Robot Generates Emotions in Real Time

On-the-fly emotion generation by one of my students! The emotions on Reachy Mini are pre-recorded. They work, but they can feel repetitive. So I gave a project at #EnseirbMatmeca to explore new ways to generate expressive motion on the fly. I'm proud to showcase the work of one of my engineering students, Anaelle Jaffré, who coded a simple system that procedurally generates emotions in real-time. She mapped the emotions using the PAD model (Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance), then used a bunch of heuristics to generate sound and motion (with lots of randomness built in). Notice in the video how "anger" is different on the second request? The result is a bit weird, but I like it a lot. I believe this approach has real potential for making human-robot interaction feel more natural and believable. Everything is open source. I'd be very happy if someone continued this work :) (My contribution was just adding the graphical interface and integrating it into the conversation app, all the cool stuff is Anaelle’s work!) 📄 Technical report: https://github.com/InTheSnow31/reachy... 💻 Open source code: https://huggingface.co/spaces/RemiFab...