Human-friendly Communication for Smart Device Interlocked Robot Partners

Recently, various types of robot partners have been developed to realize natural communication with people. In general, we should develop a robot partner specific to a given task in order to reduce the developmental cost while considering environmental conditions according to the given task. Therefore, we have proposed a total architecture to develop robot partners using smart devices such as smart phones and tablet PC. In this paper, such kind of robot is called a smart device interlocked robot partner. The total architecture is based on the concept of informationally structured space and life hub. In this paper, we discuss human-friendly communication of robot partners applicable to different human behaviour patterns. First, we explain the concept of life hub to connect a person with information, and explain the total architecture of an informationally structured space. Next, we explain a conversation system composed of daily conversation mode, contents conversation mode, information support mode, and scenario conversation mode based on informationally structured space to realize natural communication with people. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical experiments using a human behaviour mode, and discuss the future direction of smart device interlocked robot partners. (C) 2016, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting Elsevier Ltd. All rights reseirved.