Animal-machine interfaces

Abstract

During the last decades much effort have been done to develop human-machine interfaces that has led to several devices that help humans to use them. Our main motivation for this project is that those traditional human-machine interfaces and their advantages can be extended to other living beings, in order to provide them comfort and also to enhance human-animal communication. In this paper we present the results of the first two years of a research project named UNAM-CAN, which is a joint effort of the Engineering and Zoological faculties at UNAM University. The project involves a service dog that carries a computer (Wearable Computer), that gives simple commands through a speaker. The main idea is that a complex task can be decomposed into simple sequential tasks that the dog can execute. One of the main problems to solve is that the dog needs to perform the requested tasks without the presence of a person. We did some experiments that shows that this is feasible.