How does a Balancing Motion of a Humanoid Robots Affect a Human Motion and Impression?

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate how the balancing motion of a humanoid robot affects human swaying and their impressions. A humanoid robot that has a dynamic balancing controller maintains its balance and sways. We believe such body swaying is important for communication robots to appear similar to humans. To verify the validity of the motion, we conducted experiments with our developed humanoid robot which has wheeled inverted pendulum mechanism. In the experiment, we established five object conditions for a subject to face: (1) a human, (2) a robot in an inverted pendulum state, (3) a robot with passive casters, and (4) an LCD monitor with its power turned off. Condition (2) was divided a normal inverted pendulum state and a humanlike swaying inverted pendulum state. We discovered congruences between subject and robot body swaying, the impressions of the robot changes, and the effects of robot body swaying on subjects. If we can clarify why subjects experience congruence with the robot, the fundamental indicator for natural communication between humans and robots will be confirmed. In this research, we reported that robot swaying affects human body swaying and impressions. Moreover, we showed that congruence was effective for communications between humans and a humanoid robot