Behavior Model for Hearing-Dog Robot

Abstract

Hearing dogs play a role of assisting hearing-impaired people. The touch of the dog to the people can alert the people to important life sounds, such as doorbells, alarm clocks and fire alarms. These dogs are professionally trained to touch and lead the handler to the source of the sound. Meanwhile hearing dogs are insufficient in the world. Thus a hearing-dog robot is expected as an alternative assistant. In this paper we proposed and constructed a behavior model for the hearing-dog robot. The behavior model is constructed by a discrete state transition. The robot can change the state and act properly according to the information acquired from the sensors of the robot. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the proposed behavior model. In the experiment the robot actually could act according to the behavior model, but in some cases the robot failed to notify the target user. We discussed the causes the robot failed and the improvements to solve them.