Communication Robots in Real Environments

Abstract

The development of robots is entering a new stage, where the focus is on interaction with people in their daily environments. We are interested in developing a communication robot that operates in everyday conditions and supports peoples’ daily life through interactions with body movements and speech. The concept of the communication robot is now rapidly emerging and developing, with communication robots in the not-too-distant future likely to act as peers providing mental, communication, and physical support. Such interactive tasks are important for enabling robots to take part in human society. Many robots have already been applied to various fields in real environments. We discuss the details of related works in the next section. Here, there are mainly two kinds of fields: closed and open. The difference between a closed and an open environment lies in the people who are interacting. In a closed environment, such as an elementary school or an office, robots interact with a limited group of people. On the contrary, we chose to work in an open environment because we expect that many people, in a wide-range of ages, will interact with robots. In line with this prospect, we have been developing a science museum guide robot that we believe to be a promising application. There is a double benefit in choosing a science museum as the experiment field. On the one hand, visitors have the opportunity to interact with the robots and experience the advanced technologies by which they are made, which is the fundamental purpose of a science museum. Thus, we can smoothly deploy our research in a real environment. On the other hand, in a science museum we are naturally targeting people who are interested in science and are unlikely to miss the chance to interact with our robots; thus this field is one of the best choices for collecting feedback and examining the interaction between people and the communication robot in various tasks. The need for extensive and accurate feedback goes back to our belief that interaction with humans through tasks is one of the communication robot’s essential roles. This feedback is vital for developing the ability of the robots to act appropriately in a daily living environment. In this chapter, we introduce recent research efforts in communication robots in real environments and describe an experiment in which a system using many ubiquitous sensors and humanoid robots -- Robovies -- guide the visitors at a science museum. In this setting, the Robovies interacted with the visitors and showed them around to exhibits according to information from ubiquitous sensors, such as the visitors’ positions and movement histories.