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kind of system allows us to control humanlike and nonhumanlike robots [20]. Turtle
Talk with Crush is the most successful marionette in the commercial field [21]. It is a
screen agent that interactively changes its face and behavior according to people's
responses.
However, these studies are specialized to each robot's shape and modalities. Mani-
pulation requires not a small amount of training time although interface is supported
by today's technologies. This marionette system is not appropriate for the trial-and-
error approach that required in our method.
3
Designing the Possessed Robot Method
Possessed Robot method is a design method conducted by two participants. One par-
ticipant possesses a robot and behaves as if she/he is the robot. Another participant
interacting with robot.
Based on the differences to previous studies mentioned in above section, we esti-
mate that the following three sub goals are required to perform the Possessed Robot
method. First, the Possessed Robot method requires a reconfigurable robot body to
examine all kinds of robot shapes and modalities. Second, the manipulation method
must be easy for the human manipulator to allow frequent trial-and-error efforts.
Third, the system requires recording the interaction between the robot and the human
for later analysis.
The entire design process is described below:
•
Select the robot input and output, and configure the robot shape and modalities.
•
Assign two persons as the manipulator (who possesses the robot) and the player
(who follows the robot).
•
Connect the robot input and output to the manipulator. All connections are re-
quired to be understood and controlled by humans.
•
Two persons interact via the robot and conduct a task cooperatively. They repeat-
edly try to interact and gradually find the most optimal communication strategies for
the task. The system records the entire interaction.
•
The evaluators analyze the result of the interaction and the kind of modalities,
which are the most and least required. We also compare the results with the human-
human interaction findings, which is the original interaction setup for the robot.
This process brushes up the robot design. If we require a more detailed analysis, we
can also select more optimal shapes and modalities with the results from process 5,
and repeat the entire process.
4
System
We implemented PoRoS (Possessed Robot demonstrative System) to estimate the
validity of our process. We used a reconfigurable robot, a monitoring device to
capture movement, and a recording system to solve the sub goals mentioned in the
previous section.