Field trial approach for communication robots

Over the past several years, many humanoid robots have been developed, and they can typically make sophisticated human-like expressions with their head and arms. We believe that humanoid robots will be suitable for communicating with people. The human-like bodies of humanoid robots enable humans to intuitively understand their gestures and cause people to unconsciously behave as if they were communicating with humans. In the future, we believe that these robots will behave as peer-partners to support daily human activities based on advanced communication capabilities. In order to develop such a "communication robot," we are studying bodily interaction between humans and the robot in a laboratory environment, where we found the importance of cooperative behaviors. Moreover, the developed robots were tested in field trials, which are important for studying potential real-world applications of communication robots, still a largely unexplored field.