An effective virtual agent (VA) that serves humans not only completes tasks efficaciously, but also manages its interpersonal relationships with users judiciously. Although past research has studied how agents apologize or seek help appropriately, there lacks a comprehensive study of how to design an emotionally intelligent (EI) virtual agent. In this paper, we propose to improve a VA's perceived EI by equipping it with personality-driven responsive expression of emotions. We conduct a within-subject experiment to verify this approach using a medical assistant VA. We ask participants to observe how the agent (displaying a dominant or submissive trait, or having no personality) handles user challenges when issuing reminders and rate its EI. Results show that simply being emotionally expressive is insufficient for suggesting VAs as fully emotionally intelligent. Equipping such VAs with a consistent, distinctive personality trait (especially submissive) can convey a significantly stronger sense of EI in terms of the ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions, and can better mitigate user challenges.

The thorax of an insect has direct flight muscles that can independently control the flapping amplitude, relative phase, and mean position of its left and right wings. This feature allows insects to modulate lateral dynamics during hovering flight, resulting in high flight maneuverability. This paper introduces the development and characterization of a novel flapping mechanism for MAVs, denoted as AIFM (Asymmetric In-phase Flapping Mechanism), that is capable of achieving controlled, asymmetric in-phase wing flapping as inspired by similar features in insects. The system consists of two 4-bar mechanisms that create basic flapping motions and two RRPR mechanisms that control the asymmetric flapping motion. The kinematics of the mechanism was investigated and optimized in such a way that enables the mechanism to produce reliable, in-phase wing motion during asymmetric flapping flight. The kinematics of the wings was evaluated both computationally and experimentally. It was shown that asymmetric wing flapping can be successfully achieved without affecting the in-phase flapping motion.