Gaming humanoid: A humanoid video game player with emotional/encouraging movement and skill level control

This study proposes “Gaming Humanoid”, a robot that is able to play video games with human as a partner in the same gaming conditions found typically in a gaming environment, in particular, using body gestures and being able to adapt the skill level. We developed an autonomous video gameplay capability of the humanoid robot NAO. In the autonomous gameplay, we used image processing to recognize the gaming situation and play along with the content. Also we designed the robot´s body movement to perform realistic gameplay and to be able to adapt gaming performance. The result with Tennis Game shows that the gaming humanoid was able to play in real gaming environment and also able to control performance of gameplay. The experiment with human showed that the gaming humanoid was not inferior to human level in terms of gameplay. Moreover, the preliminary study with children demonstrated its feasibility of facilitating interactions by implementing emotional/encouraging behaviors. In this paper, we introduce the gaming humanoid as a playmate partner for human, and we describe and evaluate the whole system.