Cooperative embodied communication emerged by interactive humanoid robots

Research on humanoid robots has produced various uses for their body properties in communication. In particular, mutual relationships of body movements between a robot and a human are considered to be important for smooth and natural communication, as they are in human-human communication. We have developed a semi-autonomous humanoid robot system that is capable of cooperative body movements with humans using environment-based sensors and switching communicative units. And we conducted an experiment using this robot system and verified the importance of cooperative behaviors in a route-guidance situation where a human gives directions to the robot. This result indicates that the cooperative body movements greatly enhance the emotional impressions of human in a route-guidance situation. We believe these results will allow us to develop interactive humanoid robots that sociably communicate with humans.