Making a Mobile Robot to Express its Mind by Motion Overlap

Various home robots like sweeping robots and pet robots have been developed, commercialized and now are studied for use in cooperative housework (Kobayashi & Yamada, 2005). In the near future, cooperative work of a human and a robot will be one of the most promising applications of Human-Robot Interaction research in factory, office and home. Thus interaction design between ordinary people and a robot must be very significant as well as building an intelligent robot itself. In such cooperative housework, a robot often needs users’ help when they encounter difficulties that they cannot overcome by themselves. We can easily imagine many situations like that. For example, a sweeping robot can not move heavy and complexly structured obstacles, such as chairs and tables, which prevent it from doing its job and needs users’ help to remove them (Fig. 1). A problem is how to enable a robot to inform its help requests to a user in cooperative work. Although we recognize that this is a quite important and practical issue for realizing cooperative work of a human user and a robot, a few studies have been done thus far in Human-Robot Interaction. In this chapter, we propose a novel method to make a mobile robot to express its internal state (called robot’s mind) to request users’ help, implement a concrete expression