Fourth-person sensing for a service robot

This paper proposes a new concept named "fourth-person sensing" for a service robot. The proposed concept combines wearable sensors (the first-person viewpoint), sensors mounted on robots (the second-person viewpoint), and sensors embedded in the environment (the third-person viewpoint), and the disadvantages in individual sensors are compensated by combining sensory information from the first, second, and third-person viewpoints. The fourth-person sensing is effective to understand a user´s intention and a context of the scene, thus it enables to provide a proper service by a service robot. As one of applications of the fourth-person sensing, we develop a HCI system combining the first-person and the third-person sensing, and show the effectiveness of the proposed concept through robot service experiments.