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

Chaoran Liu

Research Scientist

Kurima Sakai

Research Scientist

Tomo Funayama

Technical Staff I

Ryusuke Mikata

Technical Staff I

Yuka Nakayama

Technical Staff I

Takamasa Iio

Visiting Scientist

Changzeng Fu

Visiting Scientist

Alexander Diel

Visiting Researcher

Bowen Wu

Research Part-time Worker I and Student Trainee

Jiaqi Shi

Research Part-time Worker I and Student Trainee

Taiken Shintani

Research Part-time Worker I and Student Trainee

Houjian Guo

Research Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Shudai Deguchi

Student Trainee

Namika Taya

Administrative Part-time Worker II and Student Trainee

Former member

Yuki Hori

Student Trainee (2020/08-2022/03)

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. Uchida, T., Takahashi, H., Ban. M., Shimaya, J., Minato, T., Ogawa, K., Yoshikawa, Y., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "Women Don't Hesitate to Self-disclose to Robots: Gender Differences for Attitude toward Robots"
   Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, Vol.4, No.3, p.35 (2020)
2. Zheng, X., Shiomi, M., Minato, T., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "How Can Robot Make People Feel Intimacy Through Touch?"
   Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics, Vol.32, No.1, pp.51-58 (2020)
3. Jinnai, N., Sumioka, H., Minato, T., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "The Multi-modal Interaction through Anthropomorphically Designed Communication Medium Enhances the Self-Disclosures of the Personal Information"
   Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics, Vol.32, No.1, pp.76-85 (2020)
4. Zheng, X., Shiomi, M., Minato, T., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "What Kinds of Robot's Touch Will Match Expressed Emotions?"
   IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol.5, Issue 1, pp.127-134 (2019)
5. Uchida, T., Minato, T., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "Who is responsible for a dialogue breakdown? An error recovery strategy that promotes cooperative intentions from humans by mutual attribution of responsibility in human-robot dialogues"
   Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Vol.6, No.29 (2019)
6. Ishi, CT., Minato, T., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "Analysis and generation of laughter motions, and evaluation in an android robot"
   APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, Vol.8 (2019)
7. Shiomi, M., Shatani, K., Minato, T., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "How should a Robot React before People's Touch?: Modeling a Pre-Touch Reaction Distance for a Robot’s Face"
   IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol.3, Issue 4, pp.3773-3780 (2018)
8. Sakai, K., Minato, T., Ishi, CT., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "Novel Speech Motion Generation by Modelling Dynamics of Human Speech Production"
   Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Vol.4, No.49 (2017)
9. Ishi, CT., Minato, T., and Ishiguro, H.:
   "Motion Analysis in Vocalized Surprise Expressions and Motion Generation in Android Robots"
   IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol.2, Issue 3, pp.1748-1754 (2017)
10. Kuwamura, K., Minato, T., Nishio, S., and Ishiguro, H.:
    "Inconsistency of Personality Distortion Caused by Appearance Gap in Robotic Telecommunication"
    Interaction Studies, Vol.16, No.2, pp.249-271 (2015)

Links

Interactive Robot Research Team(RIKEN)