Mental commit robot and its application to therapy of children

摘要

This paper describes the research on mental commit robot that seeks a different direction that is not so rigidly dependent on such objective measures as accuracy, speed, and cost. The main goal of this research is to explore a new area in robotics, with an emphasis on human-robot interaction. In the previous research, we categorized robots into four categories in terms of appearance. Then, we introduced a cat robot and a seal robot, and evaluated them by interviewing many people. The results showed that physical interaction improved subjective evaluation. Moreover, a priori knowledge of a subject has much influence into subjective interpretation and evaluation of the robot. In this paper, 785 subjects were asked to evaluate the seal robot and the results were analyzed by multivariate analysis. In addition, we applied the mental commit robot to therapy of children similar to the animal assisted therapy. This paper describes some of the results of the "robot assisted therapy".