Abstract
Social robots are coming to appear in our daily lives. Yet, it is
not as easy as one might imagine. We developed a human-like social robot,
Robovie, and studied the way to make it serve for people in public space,
such as a shopping mall. On the technical side, we developed a human-
tracking sensor network, which enables us to robustly identify locations of
pedestrians. Given that the robot was able to understand pedestrian
behaviors, we studied various human-robot interaction. We faced with many
of difficulties. For instance, the robot failed to initiate interaction
with a person, and it failed to coordinate with environments, like causing
a congestion around it. Toward these problems, we have modeled various
human interaction. Such models enabled the robot to better serve for
individuals, and also enabled it to understand people's crowd behavior,
like congestion around the robot. I plan to talk about a couple of studies
in this line, and some of successful services provided by the social robot
in the shopping mall, hoping to provide an insight about what the social
robots in public space in a near future will be.
Biography
Takayuki Kanda is a professor in Informatics at Kyoto
University, Japan. He is also a Visiting Group Leader at ATR Intelligent
Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. He received his B.
Eng, M. Eng, and Ph. D. degrees in computer science from Kyoto University,
Kyoto, Japan, in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. He is one of the
starting members of Communication Robots project at ATR. He has developed a
communication robot, Robovie, and applied it in daily situations, such as
peer-tutor at elementary school and a museum exhibit guide. His research
interests include human-robot interaction, interactive humanoid robots, and
field trials.