SummaryResearch on human-robot interaction is getting an increasing amount of attention. Since most research has dealt with communication between one robot and one person, quite few researchers have studied communication between a robot and multiple people. This paper presents a method that enables robots to communicate with multiple people using the "selection priority of the interactive partner" based on the concept of Proxemics. In this method, a robot changes active sensory-motor modalities based on the interaction distance between itself and a person. Our method was implemented into a humanoid robot, SIG2. SIG2 has various sensory-motor modalities to interact with humans. A demonstration of SIG2 showed that our method selected an appropriate interaction partner during interaction with multiple people.

No abstract

Research on human-robot interaction is getting an increasing amount of attention. Since almost all the research has dealt with only communication between one robot and one person, there have been quite few discussions about communication between a robot and multiple people. This paper proposes a method which enables robots to communicate with multiple people using the 'selection priority of the interactive partner' based on the concept of 'Proxemics'. I n this method, a robot changes active sensory-motor modalities based o n the 'interaction distance ' information. The proposed method is implemented into a humanoid robot SIG2 using subsumption arch>itecture. SIG2 has various sensory-motor modalities to interact with humans.A demonstration of SIG2 showed that the proposed method works well during interaction with multiple people. 0-7803-8570-5/04/$20.00 02004 IEEE -71 -

No abstract