Bi-directional love between a human and a robot — realistic, genuine, biologically-inspired love — is the goal of Hooman Samani, an AI researcher at the Social Robotics Lab at the National University of Singapore. He calls this new discipline Lovotics.

He has developed a comprehensive AI simulation of the emotional and endocrine systems underpinning love in humans, allowing his robots to be “an active participant in the communicative process, [adjusting] its affective state depending on its interactions with humans.”