Development of an Autonomous Quadruped Robot for Robot Entertainment

In this paper, we present Robot Entertainment as a new field of the entertainment industry using autonomous robots. For feasibility studies of Robot Entertainment, we have developed an autonomous quadruped robot, named MUTANT, as a pet-type robot. It has four legs, each of which has three degree-of-freedom, and a head which also has three degree-of-freedom. Micro camera, stereo microphone, touch sensors, and other sensor systems are coupled with newly developed behavior generation system, which has emotion module as its major components, and generates high complex and interactive behaviors. Agent architecture, real-world recognition technologies, software component technology, and some dedicated devices such as Micro Camera Unit, were developed and tested for this purpose. From the lessons learned from the development of MUTANT, we refined the design concept of MUTANT to derive requirements for a general architecture and a set of interfaces of robot systems for entertainment applications. Through these feasibility studies, we consider entertainment applications a significant target at this moment from both scientific and engineering points of view.