Robopal: Modeling Role Transitions in Human-Robot Interaction

We have developed a new communication robot, Robopal, which is an indoor/outdoor robot for use in human-robot interaction research in the context of daily life. Robopal's intended applications involve leading and/or following a human to a destination. Preliminary experiments have been conducted to study nonverbal cues associated with leading and following behavior, and it has been observed that some behaviors, such as glancing towards the leader or follower, appear to be role-dependent. A system for representing these behaviors with a state transition model is described, based on four kinds of interaction roles: directive, responsive, collaborative, and independent. It is proposed that behavior modeling can be simplified by using this system to represent changes in the roles the robot and human play in an interaction, and by associating appropriate behaviors to each role

[1]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  What is a robot companion - friend, assistant or butler? , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[2]  Andrea Lockerd Thomaz,et al.  Effects of nonverbal communication on efficiency and robustness in human-robot teamwork , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[3]  Taketoshi Mori,et al.  Producing animal-like and friendly impressions on artifacts and analyzing their effect on human behavioral attitudes , 1999, IEEE SMC'99 Conference Proceedings. 1999 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Cat. No.99CH37028).

[4]  Anders Green,et al.  Social and collaborative aspects of interaction with a service robot , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[5]  H. Ishiguro,et al.  Using Prosodic and Voice Quality Features for Paralinguistic Information Extraction , 2006 .

[6]  John Nicholson,et al.  RoboCart: toward robot-assisted navigation of grocery stores by the visually impaired , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  MINERVA: a second-generation museum tour-guide robot , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).

[8]  Tetsuo Ono,et al.  Development and evaluation of interactive humanoid robots , 2004, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[9]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Designing sociable robots , 2002 .

[10]  Takayuki Kanda,et al.  Interactive Humanoid Robots for a Science Museum , 2006, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[11]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Behavioral overlays for non-verbal communication expression on a humanoid robot , 2007, Auton. Robots.

[12]  Fumio Kanehiro,et al.  Humanoid robot HRP-2 , 2008, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[13]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Experiences with an Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot , 1999, Artif. Intell..

[14]  Stephanie Rosenthal,et al.  Designing robots for long-term social interaction , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[15]  Hiroshi Ishiguro,et al.  Automatic extraction of paralinguistic information using prosodic features related to F , 2008, Speech Commun..

[16]  Vladimir A. Kulyukin,et al.  On natural language dialogue with assistive robots , 2006, HRI '06.