Yuta Yoshiike

STB: Child-Dependent Sociable Trash Box

In this paper, we explore the effective social cues, behaviors, and potential interactive spaces (the proxemics) in the approach of a child-dependent robot. The proposed social trash box (STB) robot uses the above interactive social cues and vocal interactions to build a social coupling with children in order to induce their assistance in the collection of trash. We discuss the minimalist design of mechanism for the STB, as well as the effectiveness of the above factors, through an experiment which is conducted in a child-centric environment. A model-based unsupervised approach is proposed to elicit the proxemic information (interactive spaces) by considering the dynamic (i.e., the interactive distance and duration of interactions) interaction of the children.

STB: human-dependent sociable trash box

We developed a Sociable Trash Box (STB) as a children-assisted robot able to collect the trash in order to convey its intentional stance to children. The STB is capable of engaging manifold affiliation behaviors to build a social rapport with children by collecting the trash around their environment. In particular, the STB is a child-dependent robot that walks alone in a public space for tracing humans and trash for the purpose of collecting the trash. The robot is incapable of collecting the trash by itself, and it engages by using interactive behaviors and vocalizations to make a social coupling with children based on the robots anticipation to accomplish its goal. The present experiment investigates how STB behaviors are effective in conveying intentions to evoke childrens social interactions and to assist in collecting the trash in their environment.

MAWARI: a social interface to reduce the workload of the conversation

In this paper, we propose a MAWARI-based social interface as an interactive social medium to broadcast information (e.g. news, etc.). The interface consists of three sociable creatures (MAWARIs) and is designed with minimalism designing concepts. MAWARI is a small scale robot that has only body gestures to express (or interact) its attractive social cues. This helps to reduce the observing workload of the user, because during the conversation the creature just uses vocal interactions mixed with attractive body gestures. The proposed interface is capable of behaving in two kinds of states: behavior as a passive social interface and also as an interactive social interface in order to reduce the conversation workload of the participant.

COLUMN: dynamic of interpersonal coordination

In this study we develop Core Less Unformed Machine (COLUMN) as novel & transformable robotic platform to explore how visually mediated information is useful to coordinate (interpersonal coordination) to establish connectedness of three participants to obtain COLUMNs behaviors (transformable rolling motions).

STB: intentional stance grounded child-dependent robot

This paper reports on a children-dependent robotic approach to establish asynchronous child assistance with a social rapport network for the purpose of collecting trash from a public space. Our sociable trash box robot (STB) was unable to collect trash by itself. However, it did succeed in conveying its intentions to collect the trash from children. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effective social cues, behaviors, and other essential factors to facilitate children in their anticipation of the behavior of a sociable trash box robot. The STB engages by using interactive social cues and vocal interactions to build a social coupling with children in order to induce their assistance in collecting trash. We discuss the minimalism designing mechanism of the STB, as well as the effectiveness of the above factors through an experiment which is conducted in a child-centric environment.

Sociable trash box

The STB is capable of engaging manifold affiliation behaviors to build a social rapport toward the goal of collecting trash around an environment. In particular, STB is a child-dependent robot that walks alone in a public space for the purpose of tracing humans and trash and to collect the trash. In a crowded space, STBs move toward the trash by engaging with an attractive twisting motion (behaviors) and vocal interaction to convey STBs intention to children. Our STB robot is incapable of collecting the trash by itself. In this sense, children have to infer a robots intentional stance or expectation for interaction with the STB. To collect trash while creating social rapport with children is a novel concept. The STB engages with twisting and bowing motions when children put trash into an STB container (figure 1).

SDT: a "konkon" interface to buildup the connotation interactions

The advantage of the proposed approach is that users can invent their own communication protocol (based on the knock patterns) to communicate with the creature. This approach is a novel concept to establish future human-robot communication protocols within many contexts or human centric applications. However, through symbolic communication (knock-based communication) a human is able to convey to the robot to adapt and communicate with their personalized communication protocol.

MAWARI: an interactive social interface

In this paper, we propose a MAWARI-based social interface as an interactive social medium to broadcast the information to users. The interface consists of three creatures (MAWARIs) and is designed with minimalism designing concepts. MAWARI is a small scale robot that has only body gestures to express (or interact) its attractive social cues. The participants role is reduced to that of a bystander when the interface is of a passive social state. In this context, the user does not need to participate in the conversation but still gains information without exerting effort (i.e., less conversational workload).