Height adjustable Multi-legged Giant Yardwalker for variable presence

Abstract

Unlike industrial robots, human interaction robots are designed to focus on coexistence with humans. In order to coexist with humans, there are many considerable factors. Among them, one of the important factor is that how the robot is shown to human. According to the situation of interaction between a human and the robot, the required robot's presence is different. If the presence of the robot is too weak or too strong for the situations, the human may feel uncomfortable. Therefore, this paper proposes Multi-legged Giant Yardwalker (MGY) which can vary its presence by changing its height. The MGY is able to change its presence properly based on the situation, and the user likely to gain consciousness of the robot or may not be aware of the robot. In this paper, we report a method of controlling the presence by adjusting height with additional delta joint. The early experimental results showed that the robot expressed various presence by height difference.