Gomy: The Baby Bear-like Robot for Emotional Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

This paper describes the design of emotional interactive robot, one of the important issues in socially interactive robot. We developed the Gomy, the baby bear-like robot, considering social evocativeness and social interface for emotional interaction with human. Emotional interaction system of Gomy is based on very simple 2-D emotion space and consists of intention recognition system, emotion generations system, and emotion expression system. Gomy senses human's intention from touch, stroke, and/or loudness of sound using four force sensitive resistors (FSRs), an accelerometer, and a microphone. From sensed human's intention, Gomy generates two continuous emotion variables (valence and arousal) defining emotion states, and expresses reactive response and 81 kinds of deliberative motion patterns with two motion factors. In our preliminary experiment, Gomy was very attractive to emotional interaction with human.