Development of friendly artifact-first prototype: penguin

Abstract

Describes what a friendly artifact is and the development of the first prototype robot system of a friendly artifact for multiple sensored interaction. The multiple sensored interaction is indispensable to realize the recognition of scene context, natural communication, self-expression and intuitive teaching which enables the robot to work besides humans in daily life. We developed a full-body prototype robot which works on a table. It has cameras, microphones, and a tactile sensor suit which covers its entire body. It also has a speaker to speak with, and has 15 DOF to realize gestures. A system with multi-threaded structure was built to realize multiple sensored interaction based on context and was implemented as a context based interaction system, the plausibility was confirmed in an experiment.