KITARO: Kyutech intelligent and tender autonomous robot

The interaction between robots and humans is a research topic, which has been given much attention recently. At our laboratory, we have developed an interactive robot that works in a human living space. This robot has been named KITARO (Kyutech intelligent and tender autonomous robot). KITARO is designed to collect and understand several types of human information by moving around in a human living space. Additionally, KITARO has the ability to imitate human behavior based on time-series information. In this paper, we describe the hardware and software, which work in KITARO. In order to realize the system for collecting human visual information around KITARO´s working area, we have associated certain modules into KITARO. The first module is HeadFinder, which has the capability of detecting and tracking a human head. The second module is HeadClassifier, which estimates several categories, e.g., the gender and the age of human based on head image information from HeadFinder. By using these modules, the KITARO can understand and abstract the trajectory of a person walking in front of its.