Verification on usefulness of robot's touch behavior to communicate its intention and arouse human action to assist it

Abstract

Cleaning robots such as Roomba are popular in homes and offices in recent years. People sometimes need to support the robot while the robot performs cleaning task due to obstacles which interfere with the task. In this situation, the task can be carried out more smoothly if the robot can communicate its intention about the task to the people and arouse the people’s action to assist the robot. Hearing-dog robot AcToR was previously reported as an robot communicated its intention to a user. AcToR can move and touch the user. The touch behavior achieved to communicate urgent information to the user. This paper proposed to apply the touch behavior to communicate AcToR’s intention to the user and arouse the user’s action to asssist AcToR. Pet dogs and cats sometimes perform actions such as scratching the door when they want the door to be opened. If AcToR can perform similar behaviors to the pet actions, it is expected that AcToR can communicate its intention to the user and arouse the user’s action to asssist AcToR. We conducted an experiment to confirm usefulness of the robot touch behavior. The robot task is to open a door of a room and go out of the room. The experiment was conducted under two conditions “touch to the door” and “no touch”.