Designing a robot as communication media - the effect of head and body movement on co-present's impression

Abstract

We have been developing robots as a communication media. This paper focuses on the latest development named GestureMan 2. We used ATLAS, which was developed at ATR to control the robot in proportion to a remote person's walking and head movement. Our experiment with the system showed that co-present persons got better impression on the robot when it was controlled with a conventional joystick. From this result, we noticed that for this kind of robot to have an affinity to people, not only its figure but also its motion should be properly designed.