Design of Counseling Robot for Production by 3D Printer

Abstract

Nowadays, a lot of IT personnel have psychological distress. Meanwhile, counselors to help them are lack in number. To solve the problem, we proposed a counseling agent (CA) called CRECA (context respectful counseling agent). CRECA listens to clients and promotes their reflection context respectfully namely in a context preserving way. This agent can be enhanced using a body language called “unazuki” in Japanese, a kind of “nodding” to greatly promote dialogue, often accompanying “un-un” (meaning “exactly”) of Japanese onomatopoeia. This body language is expected to significantly help represent empathy or entire approval. In this paper, the agent is integrated with such a “unazuki” or “dialog promotion nodding” robot to continue the conversation naturally or context respectfully towards clients' further reflection. To realize such “unazuki”, the robot nods twice at each end of dialog sentence input by clients. Here, we introduce our newly developed robot that behaves human-like by an appropriate nodding behavior. The main motivation for developing a more human-like robot was the extension of application fields from IT workers' counselling to people, who suffers from more social problems such as financial debt, or anxiety of victory or defeat. For such applications, it is often very important that the agent behaves as much as possible human-like. Finally, we present the experimental evaluation results that proves such nodding is effective in counseling.