The Body in Affective Robotics: A Survey and Conceptual Positioning Using the Performing Arts as a Scaffold for Understanding Bodily Expressed Emotion

Affective robotics centers on recognizing emotional states and generating artificial emotions through embodied robotic systems. This paper surveys the current state of the field, with a particular focus on bodily expressed emotion—both in recognizing affect through body movements and postures, and in generating movement that is parsed as affect by human observers. Framed through the lens of the performing arts, this examination provides insights into the expressive potential of robots, motivates key open questions, and highlights challenging problems, as presented through an art-inspired case study and foundational background material. A close engagement with the performing arts suggests intense malleability and diversity of bodily expression, challenging some of the field’s prevailing goals—such as designing generally “happy” robotic movement—and emphasizing the importance of variables such as context and interactional intent. The paper concludes by proposing future directions for bodily expressed affective robotics that integrate advances from both robotics and the performing arts.