KANSEI TECHNOLOGY AND ROBOTICS

– MACHINE WITH A HEART –

Abstract

Information technology can be classified into three categories; the physical signal processing, the logical symbol processing and the KANSEI (emotional) information processing. Human communication is related to the last one. To treat KANSEI information, computer must have physical body because the KANSEI is strictly related to the fact that we have finite size of body and lifetime. Robot is one of the most suitable information terminals with multi-modal communication channel to realize a new type of man-machine interface with KANSEI. This article describes some considerations on KANSEI as the third target of information processing and human-robot interactions with some examples.