Communicative functions to support human robot cooperation

We have been developing an autonomous robotic agent that helps people in a real world environment, such as in an office. When a robotic agent works by cooperating with a person in a real world environment, it must manage a lot of information and deal with the knowledge and languages that people usually use. Therefore it is important for the agent to recognize what people request as soon as possible. To realize common communication with people, the agent should provide robust communicative functions to obtain information from people. We discuss communicative functions of our robotic agent called Jijo-2. Especially we focus on the problem of detecting human faces, and discuss how a method of detecting a human face can be robustly archived