Psychological Evaluation of a Personal-Robot Cooperating with Instructions of the Fingers.

Abstract

When robots coexist with humans, it is important that robot's movement in response to human instruction is acceptable for human state of mind. When human gives instructions to a robot with his or her finger, we pay attention to a simple and easy interface in which conversion of finger indication to robot's motion is realized by a transfer function. In this paper, we evaluate relations between the transfer functions and human emotions using SD method. The results, of SD method show that there are typical forms of transfer functions and parameters to generate comfortable motion for human. Desirable transfer functions are the first or the second order lag elements in which the parameters must be chosen so that the maximum velocity of generated robot motion exists in the range of 71-77% of the maximum velocity of instruction movement. In addition, human emotions to the robot motion generated by human indication are represented by the factors of "lively", "mild", and "interest".