A Service System Adapted to Changing Environments Using “Kukanchi”

Robots have been expected to coexist with people, providing them with suitable services. To provide services, robots need to recognize the environment, situation, context, and so on. Additionally, robots observe people’s movements in their daily life and ascertain the relations among their movements, the environment, and services. This information is inherent in the environment, and robots use it to generate services. The authors called the architecture &ldquo: Kukanchi : Interactive Human-Space Design and Intelligence.” This paper aims at the interaction between man and a robot system based on the Kukanchi space. Considering the situation, the robot system recognizes the services that users want. To implement the system, a vast amount of information is needed. The authors focused on the interface, which is divided into phases depending on the environment. This paper details two experiments using this system. The first one is a car-like robot service on a street, and the second one is a shopping assistant service in a store.