Toward a robotic attendant adaptively behaving according to human state

Abstract

This research aims to develop a robot which can adaptively attend a specific person according to the person's behavior. Transition of the person's state is modeled with finite state machine (FSM), and the robot recognizes events for the state transitions and selects an appropriate attending action for each state. We implemented attending actions for the person's walking and the sitting actions. When a person is walking, the robot takes a following action. When the person is sitting, the robot moves to a waiting position determined by considering the comfort of the person and the others. We carried out attending experiments using a real robot to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.