A Method of Empathy Robotics Based on Disgust

In this paper, we propose an empathy method for communicating robots, aiming to realize robots with human-like empathy. The proposed method determines whether the robot empathizes with humans by obtaining an empathy coefficient from the robot’s own emotions and the estimated human emotions. Weiner’s empathy experiment with a sick person showed that the robot exhibited an internal state similar to that of characters inferred from the scenario. In addition, we conducted an impression evaluation experiment on the robot’s response with and without empathy and found a significant difference at the 5% level of significance in the Mann–Whitney U test. Therefore, the effectiveness of the proposed method is suggested.