Human and humanoid robot interaction based on wearable telepresence system and affective communication model

Abstract

Human robot interaction is becoming a more important research issue in the area of robotics. A humanoid robot that can naturally interact with humans must be capable of high-level interaction skills; that is, it must be able to communicate with humans in the form of human-like skills such as gestures, dialogue communication with mutual sympathy. Besides, in case of a human, a wearable computer can be used to assist a user and enhance the interaction with robot. In this study, I present two methods to enhance the interactability between human and humanoids, the wearable telepresence system and affective communication model. A wearable system assists a user and enhances the interaction with robot through intuitively imitating the user motion while expressing multimodal commands to the robot and displaying multimodal sensory feedback. An affective communication model which designed to enable high-level communication with a human through dialogue, communicates with humans by preserving emotional memories of users and topics, and it naturally engages in dialogue with humans. In the experiments, the humanoid robots, AMI and AMIO were used to confirm the performance and effectiveness of the proposed methods. By applying the proposed approaches, we successfully demonstrated human and humanoid robot interactions and evaluated the overall performances of our wearable telepresence system and affective commnunication model. Through this study, I examined the feasibility of the real humanoid robot which is able to interact kinematically and mentally as a partner of human. By combining the proposed wearable system and the affective model, a humanoid robot will be more human-like and friendly, thus the interaction between a humanoid robot and human will be enhanced.