A user-centered framework for developing personal pet robots

Abstract

Designing pet robots for home entertainment has become an important application of intelligent autonomous robot nowadays. Yet, robot design takes considerable amount of time and the short life cycle of toy-type robots with fixed prototypes and repetitive behaviors is in fact disadvantageous. Therefore, it is significant to develop a framework of robot configuration so that the user can always change the characteristics of his pet robot easily. In this paper, we present an interactive framework that mainly considers the issues of robot control, human-robot interaction, and robot emotion. For evaluation, we use our framework to construct a control system for a toy-type humanoid robot. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed framework.