Session Overview Interfaces and Interaction

The main focus on this section is " Interfaces and Interaction ". Computer display is an interface showing the information to human visually. For providing with information from human to computer (or robots), there are many interface devices, such as force sensor, acceleration sensor, velocity sensor, position sensor, tactile sensor, vision and so forth. EMG and EEG signals are also utilized as an interface signal from handicapped people to robots. By utilizing these interfaces, interactive motion between human and robot can be achieved. Interaction with variety is extremely important for entertainment robots, amusement robots, and social robots. Since the capability of these robots strongly depends upon the reaction and the expression, both sensors and actuators are key components for advancing them. Three papers are presented in this section. The first is concerned with haptic based communication between human and robots. The second deals with the vestibular sensor that can detect head motion of human. The final paper deals with diagnosing autism through the interaction between human and robot. While these three papers are largely unrelated to each other in the purpose, the common key word is interaction between human and robot. Especially, in the first and the third paper, the interaction between human and robot is strongly intended. In the paper " Haptic Communication between Humans and Robots, " the authors present a detailed design of tactile sensor and utilization of haptic data for a robot to estimate human position and posture. They are eventually interested in obtaining a map describing the relationship between the tactile information and human positions/postures from the records of haptic interaction taken by tactile sensors and a motion capturing system composed of plural number of cameras installed in the environment. They first develop tactile sensors where each sensor element is film-type piezoelectric polymer sensors inserted between the thin and thick silicone rubber layers. The film-type sensor, consisting of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and sputtered silver, outputs a high voltage proportional to the pressure applied. The tactile sensor covers the entire robot body, so that any contact between human and robot can be detected. A couple of makers are attached to human body, so