Human-Centric Approach for Human-Robot Interaction

1 Our aim Many intelligent robots have already been developed for entertaining people or providing useful information. Such robots need capability of human-robot interaction to be a communication partner of the human. Our aim is to achieve human-robot interaction which is as natural as human-human interaction. 2 Why do people feel shy about interaction with robot? When we exhibited our robots ROBOVIE in ROBODEX2003, many people could not interact properly with robots. They seemed to be shy and have no ideas how to reply to robots(Fig1a). If a customer feels shy about communicating wit ha service providing root, the robot may not be able to provide enough service because it cannot get enough information about the task from him/her. People can interact with the robot without being shy when we concentrate on the interaction with it. However human-robot interaction studies did not take care of the problem that people can not concentrate on the interaction with the robot and they feel unnatural on the interaction itself. We assumed 2 reasons which cause " shyness " : " robot factors " and " human factors. " Robot factor is the lack of robot's capability of expressing and processing information that causes people to feel unnatural for the interaction. Recent robotics studies