Title
A considerate care robot able to serve in multi-party settings
Abstract
This paper introduces a service robot that provides assisted-care, such as serving tea to the elderly in care facilities. In multi-party settings, a robot is required to be able to deal with requests from multiple individuals simultaneously. In particular, when the service robot is concentrating on taking care of a specific person, other people who want to initiate interaction may feel frustrated with the robot. To a considerable extent this may be caused by the robot's behavior, which does not indicate any response to subsequent requests while preoccupied with the first. Therefore, we developed a robot that can project the order of service in a socially acceptable manner to each person who wishes to initiate interaction. In this paper we focus on the task of tea-serving, and introduce a robot able to bring tea to multiple users while accepting multiple requests. The robot can detect a person raising their hand to make a request, and move around people using its mobile functions while avoiding obstacles. When the robot detects a person's request while already serving tea to another person, it projects that it has received the order by indicating “you are next” through a nonverbal action, such as turning its gaze to the person. Because it can project the order of service and indicate its acknowledgement of their requests socially, people will likely feel more satisfied with the robot even when it cannot immediately address their needs. We confirmed the effectiveness of this capability through an experiment in which the robot distributed snacks to participants.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/ROMAN.2011.6005286
Atlanta, GA
Keywords
Field
DocType
collision avoidance,human-robot interaction,mobile robots,service robots,assisted-care robot,considerate care robot,multiparty settings,obstacle avoidance,service robot,tea-serving task
Social robot,Computer science,Simulation,Personal robot,Acknowledgement,Robot,Educational robotics,Human–robot interaction,Mobile robot,Service robot
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4577-1572-3
4
0.70
References 
Authors
8
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kobayashi, Y.140.70
Gyoda, M.240.70
Tabata, T.340.70
Kuno, Y.440.70