Takayuki KANDA

Japanese / English

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Elementary School Experiment We carried out an experiment to investigate the possibility of having active humanoid robots in a human society in the future. In this experiment, Robovie plays a role similar to a foreign student who just transfers to a Japanese elementary school. With such a 'foreigner' who speaks English only, we attempt to see the interaction between children and the robot. After the first graders and sixth graders each participated in the experiment for two weeks, we obtained the following results: During the first week, the children played with the robot actively. Through the interaction with robots, the children's English listening skills were developed. On the other hand, after interacting for a week, most children's excitement seemed to have satiated. This is a problem that we have to face if we want to develop robots that are applicable in human society. It turns out that there are still a lot of studying areas that require further research. Interactive Robots as Social Partners and Peer Tutors for Children: A Field Trial (Human Computer Interaction, 2004.)

Snapshots taken during the experiment

Currently, a questionnaire-based method is a common method for analyzing human-robot interactions. However, they were rather subjective, static and obtrusive. Here, we present our exploratory human-robot interaction analysis, which measures the body movement interaction between a humanoid robot and humans, and compares the results with traditional subjective evaluation. In the experiment, we attached ten markers on different body parts of the robot and the subjects. With these markers we could analyze the interaction of body movements. We could also obtain essential data such as individual's height, facing direction, potential eye contact, object displacement, and distance between the robot and subject. Having these data, we can compare our object results with the subjective evaluation provided by the participant of the experiment. It turns out that the result of the analysis indicates positive correlations between cooperative body movements and subjective evaluations. We believe this breakthrough can be served as a new basis of interaction analyzing method. Publication: Body Movement Analysis of Human-Robot Interaction (IJCAI2003)

Scene of the experiment with Motion Capturing System

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Last update May.21.2007