Immersion in Interaction with a Robot via Human's Five Senses

Abstract

This paper proposes a new communication strategy for engaging humans in interaction with a robot. In usual human-robot interaction, a person looks on the robot's behaviors without responding to them and seldom immerses him/herself in the interaction. Our communication strategy achieves person's immersion in interaction by generating an affective utterance which stimulates a person's feeling about a physical object. The innovative idea of the strategy is to employ human's five senses of the actual physical objects to mediate the human-robot interaction. In particular, since the affective utterance relates directly to a sort of human sensory perception, it is easy to develop a robot system to stimulates the person's feeling.