Published papers

Pygmy is an anthropomorphic device that magnifies hand expressions. It is based on the concept of hand anthropomorphism and it uses finger movements to create the anthropomorphic effect. Wearing the device is similar to having eyes and a mouth on the hand the wearer's hand spontaneously expresses their emotions. Interactive manipulation by controllers and sensors make the hand look animated. © 2012 Authors.

We propose a novel social robot called partially disembodied robot. This system has the advantages of real-world robots and virtual agents, guaranteeing a high social presence without sacrificing space efficiency. The robot consists of body parts that mimic human hands and eyes in order to give the user visual feedback, and is able to react to human contact through 3D detection, thus allowing the possibility for the user to interact through touching the robot. We evaluated how our system regulates users' behaviors during the solving process of the Tower of Hanoi problem. First, the users solve a Tower of Hanoi problem while being helped by the robot, but without having defined its body. In the second phase, the users were asked to define the robot's body and to play with it using the different interactions implemented. Finally, they were asked to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem once again, this time with the robot's body they defined. We could observe that the presence of the robot was perceived much more clearly by the user after they defined the robot's body, and when they were able to physically interact with it. Users' social response to the robot also seemed to be mediated by their feelings about its social presence. Finally, we found that the shyness of the users can impact the size of the robot's body that they define. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

We present the iRing, an intelligent input ring device developed for measuring finger gestures and external input. iRing recognizes rotation, finger bending, and external force via an infrared (IR) reflection sensor that leverages skin characteristics such as reflectance and softness. Furthermore, iRing allows using a push and stroke input method, which is popular in touch displays. The ring design has potential to be used as a wearable controller because its accessory shape is socially acceptable, easy to install, and safe, and iRing does not require extra devices. We present examples of iRing applications and discuss its validity as an inexpensive wearable interface and as a human sensing device.

A task that requires two hands to perform such as soldering usually needs additional tools for holding (e.g. a cable) or adding (e.g. solder) an object to a specific position. A robotic manipulator or robotic arm is one of the solution for this requirement. When gesture is selected as a method for controlling a robot, characteristics of gestures are needed for designing and developing a gesture recognition system. With this requirement, we conducted an experiment to obtain a set of userdefined gestures in the soldering task to find out properties and patterns of a gesture for future development of our research. 152 gestures were collected from 19 participants by presenting the "effect" of the gesture (robotic arm movement), and then asking the participants to perform its "cause" (a user-defined gesture). The analyzed data shows that hands are the most used body parts even they are occupied by the task, that one-hand and two-hands gestures were used interchangeably by the participants, that the majority of the participants performed reversible gestures for reversible movements, and that the participants were expecting for better recognition performance on an easier to plan gesture. Our finding can be useful as a guideline for creating gesture set and system for controlling robotic arms based on natural behavior of users. © 2012 IEEE.

This paper proposes a wearable avatar named TEROOS, which is mounted on a person's shoulder. TEROOS allows the users who wear it and control it to share a vision remotely. Moreover, the avatar has an anthropomorphic face that enables the user who controls it to communicate with people co-located with the user who wears it. We have a field test by using TEROOS and observed that the wearable avatar innovatively assisted the users to communicate during their joint activities such as route navigating and buying goods at a shop. The user controlling TEROOS could give the user wearing it appropriate route instructions on the basis of the situation around TEROOS. In addition, both users could easily identify objects that they discussed. Moreover, shop staff members communicated with the user controlling TEROOS and behaved as they normally would when the user asked questions about the goods. Copyright 2012 ACM.

What will users want from robotic arms when they become part for their daily lives? We conducted an online survey to collect ideas from people about the places in which they would want to use a robotic arm and tasks that they would want the robot arm to perform. 96 people anonymously volunteered to participate in this study. More than 240 sets of place and task were identified in the results of two versions of the web-based questionnaires. The results suggest that the household, workplace, and working surface are, respectively, the three most-mentioned places for robotic arm usage in daily life, that participants who were from different countries but were familiar with information technology did not show significant differences in their answers, and that females showed more interest in household and self-care tasks. Our findings can be used as a guideline for future research and development that focuses on daily life tasks for robotic arms. © 2012 IEEE.

Unpredictable user behaviors in a physical process represent one of the fundamental obstacles to the realization of a Cyber-Physical System. In this paper, we propose the use of social cues such as body shape, expressions, and verbal timing to control user behaviors in the physical world. Social cues can control user behaviors in both their spatial and temporal aspects. As a result, user actions become more predictable in a CPS. We consider how social cues restrict user behaviors by referring to a number of psychological, cognitive, and human-robot interaction studies, and we propose a model of restriction based on social cues. Using this model, we created hardware and software in order to realize attachable social cues, and we seek to demonstrate the effect of social cues using the example of home appliances.

In this study, we propose a disembodied real-world agent and the study of the influence of this disembodiment on the social separation between the user and the agent. In order to give a clue to the user about the presence of the robot and to make possible a visual feedback, we decide to use independent robotic body parts that mimic human hands and eyes. This robot is also able to share real-world space with the user, and react to his presence, through 3d detection and oral communication. Thus, we can obtain an agent with an important presence while keeping good space efficiency, and as a result ban any existing social barrier.

This paper investigates robot's behaviors to get voluntary conscious responses from users. Our final goal is to construct an asynchronous human-to-human communication mediated by a potable robot. The robot has a behavior system which makes the robot behave in response to the acquired conscious response. The system also enables the user to give the robot feedback at anytime and anywhere while the robot presents a script which an author prepared. We investigate how well the behavior system encourages the users to give the robot feedback and how much the users consider inputting the response to be meaningful. The results show that there are definite relation between response behavior and the acquisition of the conscious responses.

An unobtrusive measurement tool is important for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research that does not want to attach markers or devices on the experiment subjects. This property allows a natural observation of interaction between human and robot during the experiment. In HRI, an experiment that involves with psychological evaluation usually requires physical measurement for evaluating the interaction, for instance, distance, direction, and approaching speed between human and robot. Low-profile Evaluation System (LES) is an ongoing work in creating an unobtrusive measurement tool for HRI research that provides 3D video recording, playback and measurement inside 3D scene in real-time. LES is designed to operate on a single computer to make setup and experiment outside laboratory environment easier. The demonstration in the real-word setup shows that LES provides acceptable 3D measurement accuracy for HRI research. © 2011 IEEE.

Auditory instruction is a well used method for people of all ages because of its understandability. However the additional voice has the possibility to disturb the user's learning during the instruction because it strongly implies the support of third-person helpers. This risk increases with older people because their confidence in their ability may decline compared to the younger people. The authors propose a method to anthropomorphize an instructed target (a vacuum) to decrease the feeling of a third person during instruction. The authors conducted the experiment using our method to explain features of household appliance and evaluated the relationship between recalled features and older people's internal scale. The results show that older people remembered more features by using our method, and with female participants, their internal scales increased during the training. This demonstrates that our method can decrease the third-person feeling in female participants and increase the amount learned. Our findings suggest that auditory instructions may be an effective learning method for older adults.

The paper proposes a new reading style of blog contents by developing a cell phone based portable robot named BlogRobot. BlogRobot presents the contents with its embodied expressions and enhances the user's feelings of sharing experience with his/her friend. Moreover, he/she easily prepares the contents of BlogRobot by just inserting icons into the blog texts with an authoring tool. The paper explains the overview of the mechanisms used by BlogRobot.

Today's household appliances are quickly increasing their features and functions. These new technologies require innovative training methods to maintain learning motivation especially with older users, because they may need more time to learn. Conventional manuals are insufficient to maintain motivation in this population. Previously studied assistive communication robots also have difficulty explaining a second device because their strong presence distracts the user from the device during explanation. We propose an anthropomorphized learning method that sustains older people's motivations to learn new technologies. Our method creates an anthropomorphized household appliance using robot eyes and arms. This method assists the learning process using human expressions. These human-like expressions attract users during training and maintain learning motivation. Our system uses three forms of anthropomorphization: pointing, directive motion, and emotion. We designed and implemented both hardware and software and evaluated the method by training older people to learn a vacuum's features. Our method increased older people's emotional status by an average of 2.53 points compared with the manual learning that decreased emotional status by -.53. This increased emotional status suggests that our system could maintain older users' motivation more effectively compared with traditional manual methods.

Dialogue interface with voice is one of the common methods of interaction between a user and a machine. This interface is believed to be easy for all people because auditory information doesn't require additional knowledge from users. However, having only auditory instructions sometimes causes misinterpretation of spatial information like locations and directions. This risk becomes large, especially with older people, because users' mental abilities to manipulate images or patterns decrease with age. We support older people's learning of spatial information by using an attachable gesture robot. Our robot consists of human-like eyes and arms and is attached to the object. It supports older people's mental manipulation of space with gestures during voice interaction. We designed and implemented both hardware and software on a vacuum robot and evaluated the method by training older people to learn its features. We compared two instructional methods that explained eight features on the vacuum, one method with voice and gestures and one with only voice. The results show that the subjects were more likely to remember two features if given training with gestures. We also found that their learning motivation was increased when given voice and gesturing instructional methods.

In this study, we investigated the boundary for recognizing robots. Many anthropomorphic robots are used for interactions with users. These robots show various body forms and appearances, which are recognized by their users. This ability to recognize a variety of robotic appearances suggests that a user can recognize a wide range of imaginary body forms compared with the native human appearance. We attempted to determine the boundary for the recognition of robot appearances. On the basis of our previous studies, we hypothesized that the discrimination of robot appearances depends of the order of the parts. If the body parts of a robot are placed in order from top to bottom, the user can recognize the assembly as a robot body. We performed a human-robot experiment in which we compared the results for robots with ordered parts with those for robots with inverted parts. The result showed that the users' perception of the robot's body differed between the two groups. This result confirms our hypothesized boundary for the recognition of robot appearances.

This study investigates people's use of objects and the things they do in their daily lives. This is because interaction with objects can give us valuable insights with regard to behavior. The problem is that in an environment where multiple users interact with the same object, it is difficult to obtain data relating to each individual. To this end, we propose a model that extracts individual data from a data set. We can recognize individual users in environments where multiple users interact with an object. The model consists of 3 policies. As a result of our experiment, we proved that the system could extract individual data that fits an individual examinee's consciousness an average of 85.3% of the time. In addition, by letting each examinee look back on the system results, we could make the examinee conscious of behavior of which they had previously been unaware.

Mobile phones and PDAs with GPS became widespread, and GPS-based service of mobile terminal is rising, so needs for presentation interface for GPS-based contents are increasing. We employ a robot as a presentation interface. In this paper, we use a blog as our content and propose a portable robot named "BlogRobot" that presents blog content by using verbal and non-verbal expression. Using BlogRobot, people who don't have the knowledge of a specialist can create behavior contents as they note in a diary, and the contents can give reader a feeling like a man who write a blog's entry explain the entry near the entry location.