Kazunori Takashio Lab (Sociable Robots Lab)

Social Care Robot Project: Affective Communication Care Robot Understanding the Delicate Workings of Human Mind

Person in Charge of the Project : Yu MatsuiAs we are going to face great labor shortage in aging population era, there is a lot of effort to use robots in the field of social welfare. In social welfare service, building a relationships of trust between human and robots is important. Our project proposes a novel communication robot that always pays attention to the state of a conversation partner and talks according to partner's health and mental state. At the booth, we demonstrate a prototype which can talk according to the delicate workings of a conversation partner's mind sensed from facial expression and face temperature and so on, dynamically adjust an interval between the partner and handle sudden interruptions to conversation smoothly.

Sociable Robot Project: Character Development Process of a Robot through Long-Term Interaction with Users

Person in Charge of the Project : Shintaro KawanagoAs personal robots are spreading increasingly, it is expected that robots will not only exist as mere talkers, but will expand their role as a family member like domestic therapists. In long-term communication with such robots, it is important to dynamically characterize them matching the partner of the interaction. In this project, focusing on the development process of children, we are implementing a system, which adjusts the tendency of affect transition of robot through long-term interaction with users to form a character. In this exhibition, we demonstrate a prototype that can experience interaction with a robot that changes its personality in the short-term.

SocialPods Project: a Robot kit for STEM Education using Digital Fabrication

Person in Charge of the Project : Taiki MajimaThe STEM education has been attracting attention around the world. Especially in Japan, Robots have been recognized as good study tool to learn programming, sensing, and actuation. However, most educational robot kits were designed for getting engineering skills by bottom-up approach and were hard to be used as tools for learning top-down design skills such as creating robots with animacy or prototyping interactive robots. The ideal combination is top-down design learning and bottom-up study of engineering skills. In this exhibition, we report development of a novel open-source robot kit for the STEM education, called SocialPods, which enables to design-oriented robot education by effectively utilizing the Digital Fabrication environment.