Robots that can feel the mood: Contexet-aware behaviors in accordance with the activity of communications

In human communication, “social space” is regarded as a territory formed by a group, and if it is intruded on by another person without reason, the group may feel unpleasant. A robot that communicates with humans should observe the social rule described above. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a robot system that can recognize the state of a social space by using smart phones that users are equipped with. Moreover, we implemented this system and did experiments in which we had a robot join in on participants´ conversation while changing the timing of its interruption. As a result, the impression of the participants toward the robot that used the proposed system was more favorable than that toward the one that did not.