Daisuke Yamamoto

Development of a concept model of a robotic information home appliance, ApriAlpha

We have proposed a concept of a robotic information home appliance corresponding to one category of home robots, and developed ApriAlpha, a concept model of the robotic information home appliance. ApriAlpha is a wheel locomotion type human friendly home robot which controls advanced home appliances, standing between their users and them as a voice controlled information terminal, and offers security and information services to users. We have integrated various robot technologies such as voice communication, image recognition, planning and motion control on ApriAlpha, and we have introduced a framework of the distributed object technology based open robot controller architecture (ORCA), which we are currently developing in view of its easy extension and efficient development. This paper describes the proposed robotic information home appliance and its concept model, ApriAlpha. The functions of the developed robot are confirmed by performing several demonstrations, and the merit of applying the framework of ORCA to the home robot controller is also confirmed through its development.

Design targeting voice interface robot capable of active listening

The EU, South Korea and Japan have a pressing need to compensate for growing labor shortages in their aging societies. There is growing awareness that robotic technology has the potential to ameliorate this problem in terms of both physical and mental labor. To take an example of mental labor, a human therapist dealing with elderly people must be an active listener. In order to realize a robot capable of active listening, we adopt Iveys basic listening sequence skills in microcounseling. In this paper, we describe a voice interface robot that realizes simple feedback, repeat feedback and questions for Iveys basic listening sequence. We conducted an experiment, whose results show that 69% of incidences of feedback have adequate reflective words for spoken sentences and 56% of questions are adequate for these reflective words.

High-speed object tracking in ordinary surroundings based on temporally evaluated optical flow

This paper describes an active camera system for high-speed object tracking. Under ordinary illumination, such as fluorescent lights, our system is capable of tracking an object in a typical indoor environment that contains a cluttered background. In order to accomplish this task, we developed a high-sensitivity high-frame-rate visual sensor system and a real-time object tracking algorithm that makes use of our previously proposed motion estimation technique, which is capable of robustly estimating optical flow in a high-frame-rate image sequence. The experimental results for our active camera system show the effectiveness and robustness of our visual sensor system and tracking algorithm.

Response control of a communication robot depends on the position and velocity of the person

The role of the communication robot is increasing for the aging society with declining birthrate especially in Japan. Thus, field trails are very important to confirm the fundamental function of the robot and to know the comments from the person who joined the verification experiment. Here, we extended the greeting function to the interface robot ApriPocoTM considering the position and velocity of the people around the robot. The result of the verification experiment is described.