Interactive Robot
Research Team

Research Summary

This team aims at developing a social robot that can naturally interact with humans and provide casual and modest support for human daily activities. We explore a mechanism underlies natural interaction and robot behaviors that subconsciously change human behaviors.

Main Research Fields

Human-Robot Interaction

Keywords

• Humanoid
• Android robot
• Humanlike expression
• Natural interaction
• Non-verbal interaction
• Multimodal recognition and expression

Research theme

• Modeling human behaviors in interaction and generating natural robot behavior
• Recognizing a state of human activity based on multimodal information
• Design of robot behaviors to lead humans’ subconscious behavioral change

Takashi Minato

Members

Carlos Toshinori Ishi

Senior Scientist

Kurima Sakai

Research Scientist

Bowen Wu

Special Postdoctoral Researcher

Taiken Shintani

Research Associate

Tomo Funayama

Technical Staff I

Yuka Nakayama

Technical Staff I

Takamasa Iio

Visiting Scientist

Chaoran Liu

Visiting Scientist

Jiaqi Shi

Visiting Scientist

Zihan Lin

Research Part-time Worker I and Student Trainee

Shudai Deguchi

Research Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Niina Okuda

Research Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Rin Takahira

Research Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Atsushi Toyoda

Research Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Naomi Uratani

Administrative Part-time Worker I

Mayuka Yamasaki

Administrative Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Minjeong Bae

Administrative Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Taiki Yano

Administrative Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Haruto Ueno

Administrative Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Nabeela Khanum Khan

Student Trainee

Teruya Inoue

Student Trainee

Former member

Ryusuke Mikata

Technical Staff I(2022/08-2023/07)

Changzeng Fu

Visiting Scientist(2022/5-2023/3)

Alexander Diel

Visiting Researcher(2022/07-2023/05)

Houjian Guo

Research Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee(2022/8-2024/3)

Namika Taya

Administrative Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee(2022/12-2024/3)

Taichi Matsuoka

Administrative Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee(2023/6-2024/3)

Yuki Hori

Student Trainee (2020/08-2022/03)

Simon Andreas Piorecki

Student Trainee(2023/12-2024/08)

Kakeru Sakuma

Research Intern(2023/9)

Research results

Upper body gestures

For the generation of natural robot movements in interaction, we are studying the generation of upper body gestures synchronized with the robot's voice. The Conditional GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) model is trained based on the data of natural human gestures while speaking. This model can generate the body/hand gestures from the input speech signals. So far, we have implemented the model in a CG agent, and have shown that human-like gestures are generated through subject experiments.

Gaze control

Selected Publications

1. Alexander Diel, Wataru Sato, Chun-Ting Hsu, and Takashi Minato, Differences in configural processing for human versus android dynamic facial expressions, Scientific Reports, Vol.13, No. 16952, 2023.
2. Carlos T. Ishi, Chaoran Liu, and Takashi Minato, An attention-based sound selective hearing support system: evaluation by subjects with age-related hearing loss, Proc. of IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integrations, 2023.
3. Xinyue Li, Carlos T. Ishi, and Ryoko Hayashi, Prosodic and voice quality analyses of filled pauses in Japanese spontaneous conversation by Chinese learners and Japanese native speakers, Proc. of International Conference on Speech Prosody, 2022.
4. Dongsheng Yang, Qianying Liu, Takashi Minato, Shushi Namba, and Shin'ya Nishida, Optimizing facial expressions of an android robot effectively: a Bayesian optimization approach, Proc. of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2022.
5. Takashi Minato, Kurima Sakai, Takahisa Uchida, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, A study of interactive robot architecture through the practical implementation of conversational android, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Vol.9, No.905030, 2022.
6. Changzeng Fu, Chaoran Liu, Carlos T. Ishi, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, C-CycleTransGAN: A non-parallel controllable cross-gender voice conversion model with CycleGAN and Transformer, Proc. of Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, 2022.
7. Taiken Shintani, Carlos T. Ishi, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, Expression of personality by gaze movements of an android robot in multi-party dialogues, Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2022.
8. Changzeng Fu, Chaoran Liu, Carlos T. Ishi, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, An adversarial training based speech emotion classifier with isolated Gaussian regularization, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Vol.14, No.8, 2022.
9. Bowen Wu, Jiaqi Shi, Chaoran Liu, Carlos T. Ishi, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, Controlling the impression of robots via GAN-based gesture generation, Proc. of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2022.
10. Wataru Sato, Shushi Namba, Dongsheng Yang, Shin'ya Nishida, Carlos T. Ishi, and Takashi Minato, An android for emotional interaction: Spatiotemporal validation of its facial expressions, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol.12, 2022.
11. Jiaqi Shi, Chaoran Liu, Carlos T. Ishi, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, 3D skeletal movement-enhanced emotion recognition networks, APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, Vol.10, No.E12, 2021.

Links

Interactive Robot Research Team(RIKEN)