As with so much else in the field of artificial intelligence, the idea that robots might one day have emotions first appeared in science fiction. The Czech playwright Karel Capek, who coined the word 'robot' in 1921, pictured robots rebelling against their creators. Isaac Asimov went on to imagine robots with more positive emotions. Philosophers soon got in on the act and within a decade had explored many of the conceptual puzzles posed by these stories. With one or two notable exceptions, however, it wasn't until the 1990s that scientists and engineers finally began the attempt to turn the stories into reality. Broadly speaking, research in emotional robotics can be divided into two distinct approaches. Some researchers prefer to concentrate on the practical task of giving robots the ability to interact with humans in emotional ways, such as detecting emotional states in people, or behaving in ways that are readily interpreted by people as expressions of emotion. Others set themselves the more ambitious task of endowing robots with an artificial analogue of the emotional-motivational system common to humans and many other animals. The two approaches reflect different goals: the first aims simply to produce robots that can interact socially with humans, whereas the second aims to deepen our understanding of what emotions really are.
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