A new design concept of robotic interface for the improvement of user familiarity

Abstract

Familiarity is the crucial requirement for the human symbiosis robot. This paper presents a new concept of a robot avatar to increase familiarity of a care service robot. The robot avatar is a small robot mounted on a main robot and equipped with minimum function to play some gestures during task execution of the main robot. By looking at the avatar, user feels as if it is controlling the main robot. A prototype of the avatar (CHIRIS) is developed and installed to a service robot IRIS. Several psychological tests about the impression of IRIS were carried out using video. Test results showed that CHIRIS is effective to give more familiar impression to the users. It is also shown that CHIRS is useful to announce IRIS's following behavior to the user preliminarily.