Bipedal humanoid robot that makes humans laugh with use of the method of comedy and affects their psychological state actively

Abstract

This paper describes the bipedal humanoid robot that makes human laugh with its whole body expression and affect human's psychological state. In order to realize "Social interaction" between human and robot, the robot has to affect human's psychological state actively. We focused on "laugh" because it can be thought as a typical example for researching "Social interaction". Looking through a Japanese comedy style called "manzai" or the art of conversation, we picked out several methods for making human laugh. Then we made several skits with the advice of comedians, and made the whole body humanoid robot perform them. Results of experimental evaluation with these skits shows that the robot's behavior made subjects laugh and change their psychological state seen as a decrease of "Depression" and "Anger".