Implementation and Evaluation of a Grip Behavior Model to Express Emotions for an Android Robot

In this study, we implemented a model with which a robot expressed such complex emotions as heartwarming (e.g., happy and sad) or horror (fear and surprise) by its touches and experimentally investigated the effectiveness of the modeled touch behaviors. Robots that can express emotions through touching behaviors increase their interaction capabilities with humans. Although past studies achieved ways to express emotions through a robot’s touch, such studies focused on expressing such basic emotions as happiness and sadness and downplayed these complex emotions. Such studies only proposed a model that expresses these emotions by touch behaviors without evaluations. Therefore, we conducted the experiment to evaluate the model with participants. In the experiment, they evaluated the perceived emotions and empathies from a robot’s touch while they watched a video stimulus with the robot. Our results showed that the touch timing before the climax received higher evaluations than touch timing after for both the scary and heartwarming videos.

Comparison Between the Facial Flow Lines of Androids and Humans

The behavior of an android robot face is difficult to predict because of the complicated interactions between many and various attributes (size, weight, and shape) of system components. Therefore, the system behavior should be analyzed after these components are assembled to improve their performance. In this study, the three-dimensional displacement distributions for the facial surfaces of two android robots were measured for the analysis. The faces of three adult males were also analyzed for comparison. The visualized displacement distributions indicated that the androids lacked two main deformation features observed in the human upper face: curved flow lines and surface undulation, where the upstream areas of the flow lines elevate. These features potentially characterize the human-likeness. These findings suggest that innovative composite motion mechanisms to control both the flow lines and surface undulations are required to develop advanced androids capable of exhibiting more realistic facial expressions. Our comparative approach between androids and humans will improve androids’ impressions in future real-life application scenes, e.g., receptionists in hotels and banks, and clerks in shops.

Design of linear surfaces that restrict the range of permissible positions of links of the manipulator mechanisms in implementation of instantaneous states

Linear surfaces are used in various spheres of human activity. One of the most common techniques of designing linear surfaces is based on the three directing curves. In some cases, one of these directing curves is not set, but rather replaced by some geometric condition imposed on the emerging surfaces, which can in form of a certain point correspondence established between the points of the rest two directing curves. The article reviews the example of designing such surfaces, which in an approximate form would restrict the zone that sets the permissible positions of links of the manipulator mechanism of certain given configuration in realization of permissible instantaneous states. The acquired linear surfaces underlie the algorithm for calculation of configurations, which do not intersect the restricted zone in case of a deadlock situation. The result of this research is the computer simulation of the motions of arm and torso mechanism of the Android robot using the obtained algorithm for calculation of configurations. The simulation of motion demonstrates that the use of linear surfaces in analysis of the relative position of the manipulator and restricted zones in the deadlock situations allows reducing the calculation time by 50-60 percent. Such reduction of calculation time is highly demanded in computer control of the arm and torso motions of the Android robot on a real time scale.

Female-Type Android’s Drive to Quickly Understand a User’s Concept of Preferences Stimulates Dialogue Satisfaction: Dialogue Strategies for Modeling User’s Concept of Preferences

This research develops a conversational robot that stimulates users’ dialogue satisfaction and motivation in non-task-oriented dialogues that include opinion and/or preference exchanges. One way to improve user satisfaction and motivation is by demonstrating the robot’s ability to understand user opinions. In this paper, we explore a method that efficiently obtains the concept of user preferences: likes and dislikes. The concept is acquired by complementing a small amount of user preference data observed in dialogues. As a method for efficient collection, we propose a dialogue strategy that creates utterances with the largest expected complementation. Our experimental results with a female-type android robot suggest that the proposed strategy efficiently obtained user preferences and enhanced dialogue satisfaction. In addition, the strength of user motivation (i.e., long-term willingness to communicate with the android) is only positively correlated with the android’s willingness to understand. Our results not only show the effectiveness of our proposed strategy but also suggest a design theory for dialogue robots to stimulate dialogue motivation, although the current results are derived only from a female-type android.

How Can Robots Make People Feel Intimacy Through Touch?

This study investigates the effects of the touch characteristics that change the intimacy perceived by humans in human-robot touch interaction with an android robot having a human-like feminine appearance. Past studies on human-robot touch interaction focused on understanding which types of human touches are used to express emotions to robots. However, they less focused on how a robot’s touch characteristics can affect humans’ perceived intimacy. In this study, first, we concentrated on two types of touch characteristics (type and place) and their effects on the perceived intimacy of a commonly used emotion in human-robot interaction, namely happiness. The results showed that the touch types are useful for changing the perceived intimacy, although the touched place did not exhibit any significant effects. Based on the results of our first experiment, we investigated the effects of different touch characteristics (length and part). We concluded that the touch part is useful to change the perceived intimacy, although the touch length did not exhibit any significant effects. Finally, the results suggested that a pat (type) by the fingers (part) is a better combination to express intimacy with our robot.