Interactive Humanoid Robot “Robovie”

The humanoid robot “Robovie” has a human-like appearance is designed for communications with humans. It has various sensors like a human, such as sense of touch, vision, audition and so on. With the sensors and the human-like body, the robot performs meaningful interactive behaviors for humans.

The size of the robot is important as an interactive robot. The Robovie size as 120 cm, which is same as a junior school student. The weight is 40 kg and the diameter is 40 cm. the robot has a head (3DOF), two eyes (2*2 DOF for gaze control), two arms (4*2 DOF) and a mobile platform (2 driving wheels and 1 free wheel).the robovie also has various sensors such as, 16 skin sensors covering the major parts of the robot, an omni-directional vision sensor, 10 tactile sensors around the mobile platform, 2 microphone to listen human voices, and 24 ultrasonic sensor for detecting obstacles. The skin sensor is important to realizing behaviors of interactive. It has developed a sensitive skin sensors using pressure sensitive conductivity rubber. This robovie also can work 4 hours and charges the battery by autonomously looking for battery charger stations. With the sensors and actuators, the robot can generate enough behaviors required for communication with humans.

Robovie is a self contained autonomous robot that has Pentium III PC on board for processing sensory data and generating behaviors. The operating system is Linux since the Pentium III PC is sufficiently fast and Robovie does not require precise real time controls like legged robots. Linux is the best solution for quick and easy development of Robovie’s software modules.

Mutual entrained gestures are important for smooth communications between a human and a robot. It has performed as experiment to ensure it. It focused on the interaction between a subject and the robot while it teaches a route direction. The relationship between the emergence of the subject’s entrained gestures and the level of understanding of the robot utterance was investigated by using several different gestures of the robots in teaching.

No comments:

Post a Comment