Toward human-friendly robot systems

An experimental prototype system including distributed autonomous mobile robots capable of cooperating with a human is demonstrated to show one of the orientations toward building a human friendly robot system. The task is to rearrange some desks and chairs in a miniature meeting room. All the various types of robot are unique and a similar one plays the role of a human through remote control equipment. Each robot makes its own reactive plan and subgoal position, referring to the intention of the other agents including a human. Fuzzy technology is useful to represent a rule for coping with a fuzzy situation, especially provided by the human´s behavior. The process to achieve a goal arrangement is shown using a hardware system. A more complicated case is presented on the computer simulation. Additionally, some simulations of solving other types of tasks are also shown as side products of applications of basic ideas developed in our research