Pet care robot for playing with canines

Abstract

This paper observes interactions between a robot and pets, especially canines, and also investigates the feasibility of pet care robot (PCR) as an alternative for human in terms of pet caring based on animal-robot interaction (ARI) with experiments. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of PCR for playing with pets, which is designed based on ARI, ethology, and user-centered approaches. The experiments were performed to observe the interactions in two conditions: when the dogs meet the robot at the first time and when the dogs already meet the robot for some times. The result summarizes that canines are able to show better interaction performances with robots through repetitive learning with their owners. Furthermore, this result also suggests the feasibility of PCR as an alternative for human pet sitter in terms of the playing function.