Humanoid Robot Presentation through Multimodal Presentation Markup Language MPML-HR

Abstract

is becoming important to improve the un- derstandability and friendliness in human-computer inter- faces and media contents. We have developed a Multimodal Presentation Markup Language, called MPML. MPML is a simple script language to make multi-modal presentation contents using animated characters for presenters. As MPML is based on XML, anyone can write MPML contents eas- ily. In conventional MPML we used animated characters as presenters. The humanoid robot is more life-like than the animated characters, because it can move and act in a real space, and look at the audience. So humanoid robots can be a more attractive presenter. In this paper, we de- scribe a new version of MPML called MPML-HR, where HR stands for Humanoid Robots. Presentation contents written in MPML-HR are performed by a biped humanoid robot in- stead of an animated character in 2D display. Anyone can control humanoid robots and make them do presentation using MPML-HR without expertise of humanoid robots. In this paper, we show the development of MPML-HR and its application to the Honda humanoid robot, ASIMO.