Development of Robovie as a platform for everyday‐robot research

Abstract

Abstract In the design of everyday robots which communicate with humans in ordinary life, particular attention must be devoted to interactions and relationships in order to achieve natural and smooth communications. For this purpose, Robovie, which we developed, is equipped with hardware mechanisms suitable for communication, such as a rich inventory of sensors, an appearance that is readily personified, and a gesture expression ability comparable to that of humans. In addition, its programs have a software architecture that was designed for easy realization of interactive functions. As a result of these distinctive features, Robovie is suitable for use as a platform for research on humanized robots, such as research on communications between robots and humans, and on the body form of robots. This paper describes its hardware and software architecture. The usefulness of Robovie as a research platform is demonstrated by experiments designed to verify its interactive functions. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 87(4): 55–65, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.10169