FEER: Establishing a Foundation for Engineering true Empathetic Robots

A workshop @RO-MAN 2025, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

The adage “it is not what you say but how you say it”, is very much true, not only for human-human communication; but, also for human-robot communication. Part of the equation to achieve natural communication lays in empathy, which enables interpersonal and human-robot connections. Although often claimed otherwise, this is far beyond mere emotion recognition.

Empathic machines have been envisioned for decades. However, despite science’s progress, they have not been realized. Often it is intertwined with affective computing, most noteworthy emotion recognition. We propose to take a step back and study human empathy, instead of mere expression and recognition of emotions. We aim to gather expertise on the relation between empathy and nonverbal communication (e.g., bodily expressions and the tone of the voice) and enable its measurement via human-robot communication.

Theoretical frameworks from linguistics and psychology on empathy, sensors and signals to measure empathy, and models to process the signals and reason about them will be identified. Subsequently, these elements will be connected and a first blueprint for true empathic robots will be outlined in the workshop.

PROGRAM

Morning (09:00 - 12:30), August 25, 2025, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

• 09:00 Welcome + Intro
• 09:05 Speaker I
• 09:30 Group Discussion Topic I
• 09:50 Speaker II
• 10:15 Group Discussion Topic II
• 10:25 Break
• 10:40 Speaker III
• 11:05 Group Discussion Topic III
• 11:25 Final Discussion + Research Proposal
• 12:15 Wrap-up + Closing Remarks