In-Corpo-Real Robot-Dreams: Empathy, Skin, and Boundaries

Abstract

This document is part of the submission for the doctoral consortium on affective computing and outlines motivation, theoretical background, and my research plan for the PhD project on empathy and social robots. My project idea can be divided into two parts where the first is focusing on theoretical analyses of empathy through binary conceptualisations and re-configuring empathic processes for human-robot-interaction (HRI). I will be drawing from feminist philosophy and empirical work studying signal processing from measurements on the skin and in machines in order to build a model for empathy as a process of crossing boundaries. In the second part I plan to consider implementations of these theoretical ideas in the design of empathic robots. The first part is aiming to understand and dissolve conceptual boundaries whereas the second part is re-establishing material and conceptual boundaries in order to contribute to ethical affective robot design.