We report the development and evaluation of a new interactive humanoid robot that communicates with humans and is designed to participate in human society as a partner. A human-like body will provide an abundance of nonverbal information and enable us to smoothly communicate with the robot. To achieve this, we developed a humanoid robot that autonomously interacts with humans by speaking and gesturing. Interaction achieved through a large number of interactive behaviors, which are developed by using a visualizing tool for understanding the developed complex system. Each interactive behavior is designed by using knowledge obtained through cognitive experiments and implemented by using situated recognition. The robot is used as a testbed for studying embodied communication. Our strategy is to analyze human-robot interaction in terms of body movements using a motion-capturing system that allows us to measure the body movements in detail. We performed experiments to compare the body movements with subjective evaluation based on a psychological method. The results reveal the importance of well-coordinated behaviors as well as the performance of the developed interactive behaviors and suggest a new analytical approach to human-robot interaction.
This paper proposes a model of approach behavior with which a robot can initiate conversation with people who are walking. We developed the model by learning from the failures in a simplistic approach behavior used in a real shopping mall. Sometimes people were unaware of the robot's presence, even when it spoke to them. Sometimes, people were not sure whether the robot was really trying to start a conversation, and they did not start talking with it even though they displayed interest. To prevent such failures, our model includes the following functions: predicting the walking behavior of people, choosing a target person, planning its approaching path, and nonverbally indicating its intention to initiate a conversation. The approach model was implemented and used in a real shopping mall. The field trial demonstrated that our model significantly improves the robot's performance in initiating conversations.
The authors have developed a robot called “Robovie” that has unique mechanisms designed for communication with humans. Robovie can generate human‐like behaviors by using human‐like actuators and vision and audio sensors. Software is a key element in the systems development. Two important ideas in human‐robot communication through research from the viewpoint of cognitive science have been obtained – one is importance of physical expressions using the body and the other is the effectiveness of the robot’s autonomy in the robot’s utterance recognition by humans. Based on these psychological experiments, a new architecture that generates episode chains in interactions with humans is developed. The basic structure of the architecture is a network of situated modules. Each module consists of elemental behaviors to entrain humans and a behavior for communicating with humans.
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