Human-Robot Interaction Design Using Smart Device Based Robot Partner

Nowadays, various robot partners have been developed to realize human-friendly interactions. In general, a robot system is composed of hardware modules, software modules, and application contents. It takes much time to design utterance contents and motion patterns as application contents simultaneously, but the design support systems mainly focus on the generation of robot motion patterns. Furthermore, a methodology is needed to easily change the specification of hardware and software according to diversified needs, and the developmental environment to design the application contents on verbal and nonverbal communication with people. In this paper, the authors propose robot partners with the modularized architecture of hardware and software by using smart devices, and propose a developmental environment to realize easy contents design of verbal and nonverbal communication. In order to solve the problem of difficulty in the content design, they develop a design support environment using design templates of communication application contents. Next, they apply the robot partner to navigate visitors to the robot contest of the system design forum held in Tokyo Metropolitan University. Finally, they show several examples of the interaction cases, and discuss the interaction design for smart device based robot partners.