Attractive, Informative, and Communicative Robot System on Guide Plate as an Attendant with Awareness of User’s Gaze

Tomoko Yonezawa,Akira Utsumi,Shinji Abe,Hirotake Yamazoe

doi:10.2478/pjbr-2013-0008

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we introduce an interactive guide plate system by adopting a gaze-communicative stuffed-toy robot and a gaze-interactive display board. An attached stuffed-toy robot on the system naturally show anthropomorphic guidance corresponding to the user’s gaze orientation. The guidance is presented through gaze-communicative behaviors of the stuffed-toy robot using joint attention and eye-contact reactions to virtually express its own mind in conjunction with b) vocal guidance and c) projection on the guide plate. We adopted our image-based remote gaze-tracking method to detect the user’s gazing orientation. The results from both empirical studies by subjective / objective evaluations and observations of our demonstration experiments in a semipublic space show i) the total operation of the system, ii) the elicitation of user’s interest by gaze behaviors of the robot, and iii) the effectiveness of the gaze-communicative guide adopting the anthropomorphic robot.

Highlights

IntroductionA (e.g. virtual agents [5] and humanoid robots [6, 26]) provide strong cues to help people guess the media’s internal states, just as in humanhuman communication [9]
A provide strong cues to help people guess the media’s internal states, just as in humanhuman communication [9]
A triangle pole was drawn in the left region of the guide plate (LR ), a cube was drawn in the right region (RR ), and no figure was drawn in the center region (CR )

Summary

Introduction

A (e.g. virtual agents [5] and humanoid robots [6, 26]) provide strong cues to help people guess the media’s internal states, just as in humanhuman communication [9]. Stuffed toys have been applied to many uses in the care of dementia patients [13] and traumatized children [16] since they offer familiar and unforced communication for people in various situations. This adaptability is caused by their flexible anthropomorphic characteristics in both avatars and partners as seen in children’s playing house. Download Date | 12/21/13 3:43 AM pecially, the communicative gazing behavior of stuffed toys should be noteworthy as an indirect controlling method to get and lead user’s subconscious attention with the familiar anthropomorphism. There are many information guide plates with voice guidance, they are not so attractive because of the characteristic impression of the automatic and artificial guidance regardless of the user’s behavior

Methods

Results

Conclusion