Cooperative embodied communication emerged by interactive humanoid robots

Abstract

Research on humanoid robots has produced various uses for their body properties in communication. In particular, mutual relationships of body movements between a robot and a human are considered to be important for smooth and natural communication, as they are in human-human communication. We have developed a semi-autonomous humanoid robot system that is capable of cooperative body movements with humans using environment-based sensors and switching communicative units. And we conducted an experiment using this robot system and verified the importance of cooperative behaviors in a route-guidance situation where a human gives directions to the robot. This result indicates that the cooperative body movements greatly enhance the emotional impressions of human in a route-guidance situation. We believe these results allow us to develop interactive humanoid robots that sociably communicate with humans.