Consideration of Life Rhythm for Hearing-Dog Robots Searching for User

Abstract

A hearing dog is a sort of assistance dog for hearing-impaired individuals. The physical touch of the dog can alert the individuals to important sounds such as doorbells, alarm clocks, and fire alarms. Although hearing dogs can assist people, there is an insufficient number of them around the world today. As an alternative, a hearing-dog robot has been developed. This robot can move around autonomously to search for a user and notify him or her of important sounds. In this work, we propose an exploring algorithm for the robot that considers past information about the location of the user. Specifically, this algorithm utilizes the user's life rhythm in order to achieve efficient exploring. In our experiments, proposed algorithm showed a shorter time as compared with the algorithm without the user's life rhythm.