Developing of Human Robot Interaction

There are two research directions in robotics development, one is to develop robot task oriented that work in limited environments, and secondly is to develop interaction oriented robots that communicate with human and will participate in human society. Pet and industrial robots are the former ones. They work in limited areas and in factories with particular tasks such as behaving like animals and assembling industrial parts. In other word, the purpose of the interaction oriented robots that are developing is not to execute particular tasks. It is trying to develop a robot that exists as the partner in our daily life. These robots will be new information of communication infrastructure.

Regarding with the robots that interact with humans, there are many researches; mimicking of human body motions, conveying intentionality through facial expressions and behavior, developing mentally commitment. However, the robots lack physical expression ability. For instance some of them have only heads, some look like animals.

Robovie is the robot that has enough physical expression ability. It can generate almost all human like behaviors required for human robot interaction and communication with humans by using rich sensory information.

To make the best use of the physical expression ability, it has started a new collaborative work between cognitive science and robotics. Cognitive science, especially on the ideas about the practical use of the properties body for communication, helps to design more effective robots behavior. To incorporate the cognitive science’ ideas, it considered a new software architecture. It enables easy to develop and rich human interaction.

Further it needs to evaluate the performance of the interactive behaviors implementation. About the task oriented robots, it can evaluate their performance with physical measures such as accuracy and speed. The measurement helps to improve the performance. It is also need to apply psychological measures of these robots that interact with humans is discussed along with how they influence humans.