Effects of the Audience Robot on Robot Interactive Theater Considering the State of Audiences

摘要

In recent years, social robots have been widely researched due to the advancement of electronics hardware and artificial intelligence learning systems. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-robot system inspired by the hero show and Kabuki shows in Japanese theater. The multi-robot system consists of multiple robots and each of the robots has its own role for instance, performer and audience. During the robot performance, audience robots tend to cheer up the performer robot through active feedbacks such as hands clapping, waving and laughing. The audience robot at the same time will lead human audiences to perform active feedback as well. As such, we believe that human audiences will be more attached to robot performance by communicating with audience robots. We also created a system where the number of robot performers adjusts to the number of audiences, which is observed by OpenPose. The effectiveness of the proposed multi-robot system is evaluated through a series of human-robot experiments.