Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed ProxEmo, an “end-to-end emotion prediction algorithm for socially aware robot navigation among pedestrians.”

ProxEmo is designed to help robots interpret human feeling, based on their gait. This enables a robot equipped with ProxEmo to better interact with humans, giving them more or less space depending on their mood.

According to the researchers—Venkatraman Narayanan, Bala Murali Manoghar, Vishnu Sashank Dorbala, Dinesh Manocha, Aniket Bera—ProxEmo “achieves a mean average emotion prediction precision of 82.47% on the Emotion-Gait benchmark dataset,” and outperforms competing algorithms.

ProxEmo is a novel approach to AI and robotics, and could have a wide range of applications as the technology matures.