Emotional Behavior Trees for Empathetic Human-Automation Interaction

For the tasks of improving caregiving in medicine and other sectors (i.e., teaching) and of constructing effective human-AI teams, agents should be endowed with an emotion recognition and management module, capable of empathy, and of modelling aspects of the Theory of Mind, in the sense of being able to reconstruct what what someone is thinking or feeling. In this paper, we propose an architecture for such a module, based upon an enhanced notion of Behavior Trees. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture on a significant example, and on a wider case study.