Development of a Mobile Robot That Plays Tag with Touch-and-Away Behavior Using a Laser Range Finder

Abstract

The development of robots that play with humans is a challenging topic for robotics. We are developing a robot that plays tag with human players. To realize such a robot, it needs to observe the players and obstacles around it, chase a target player, and touch the player without collision. To achieve this task, we propose two methods. The first one is the player tracking method, by which the robot moves towards a virtual circle surrounding the target player. We used a laser range finder (LRF) as a sensor for player tracking. The second one is a motion control method after approaching the player. Here, the robot moves away from the player by moving towards the opposite side to the player. We conducted a simulation experiment and an experiment using a real robot. Both experiments proved that with the proposed tracking method, the robot properly chased the player and moved away from the player without collision. The contribution of this paper is the development of a robot control method to approach a human and then move away safely.

Development of a Play-Tag Robot with Human–Robot Contact

“…The results show that the go-round mode showed consistently better results for all conditions. Among the conventional methods, the parallel mode showed larger touch rate and smaller stop rate, which was consistent with the literature [21]. In addition, when the human velocity was fast, the touch rate of the robot decreased.…”

“…The rules for playing tag follow those described in a previous work [21]. The robot plays the role of "it" and chases and touches other players.…”

“…The basic behavior of the robot is also the same as in [21]. When the robot is at the origin and the player is in the field, the robot's motion sequence is as follows:…”

“…We prepared three paths, as shown in Figure 14. We determined these trajectories based on the observation of tag plays by human players [21]. The three trajectories, straight, curved, and zigzag, are frequently observed as motions of players in those plays.…”

“…On the other hand, when robots participate in games that inherently involve contact, such as touch, the game is often played without actual contact for safety reasons. For example, in the tag game robot by Kasai et al [21], the robot was regarded as touching a player when the robot and the player were close enough for safety reasons. The tag game system by Moreno et al [22] extends human-to-human play, where the players are regarded to be touched when they are close enough.…”