AUTHOR=Sun Fuze , Li Lingyu , Meng Shixiangyue , Teng Xiaoming , Payne Terry R. , Craig Paul 

TITLE=Integrating emotional intelligence, memory architecture, and gestures to achieve empathetic humanoid robot interaction in an educational setting

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Robotics and AI

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/articles/10.3389/frobt.2025.1635419

DOI=10.3389/frobt.2025.1635419

ISSN=2296-9144

ABSTRACT=This study investigates the integration of individual human traits into an empathetically adaptive educational robot tutor system designed to improve student engagement and learning outcomes with corresponding Engagement Vector measurements. While prior research in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has examined the integration of the traits, such as emotional intelligence, memory-driven personalization, and non-verbal communication, by themselves, they have thus-far neglected to consider their synchronized integration into a cohesive, operational education framework. To address this gap, we customize a Multi-Modal Large Language Model (Llama 3.2 from Meta) deployed with modules for human-like traits (emotion, memory and gestures) into an AI-Agent framework. This constitutes the robot’s intelligent core that mimics the human emotional system, memory architecture and gesture controller to allow the robot to behave more empathetically while recognizing and responding appropriately to the student’s emotional state. It can also recall the student’s past learning record and adapt its style of interaction accordingly. This allows the robot tutor to react to the student in a more sympathetic manner by delivering personalized verbal feedback synchronized with relevant gestures. Our study suggests the extent of this effect through the introduction of Engagement Vector Model which can be a benchmark for judging the quality of HRI experience. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that such an empathetic responsive approach significantly improves student engagement and learning outcomes compared with a baseline humanoid robot without these human-like traits. This indicates that robot tutors with empathetic capabilities can create a more supportive, interactive learning experience that ultimately leads to better outcomes for the student.