Robot helper knows how you feel 

Humans are natural psychologists capable of reading the emotions and mental state of their fellows at a glance. Now two US researchers are building a robot that is as sensitive to emotional states as its human masters. The robot will have no emotions of its own but will be a sympathetic helper that responds to its owner's mental wellbeing. Before making the robot helper, the pair of researchers are creating the system that can reliably distinguish between separate human emotions and work out what someone is feeling.

Robot maker Nilanjan Sarkar and psychologist Craig Smith from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee are collaborating on the project to make the sensitive machine. The pair are not concerned with giving their robot emotions. They just want it to understand what humans are feeling.

Early work is concentrating on ways of accurately sensing what people are feeling, but Professor Smith acknowledged the difficulty of the task facing them.