A user-oriented framework for the design and implementation of pet robots

In recent years, application of intelligent autonomous robots for home amusement has become an important research criterion, and pet robots have been designed to become the electronic toys for the next generation. To develop pet robots that can act in real time in the real world, this work adopts the behavior-based control architecture. In our control framework, an imitation-based learning system is included to build robot behaviors. Moreover an emotional model is embedded to the control architecture. By giving the pet robot an emotional model it can explicitly express its internal conditions through its various external behaviors, as the real living creature does. To evaluate the proposed framework, we have developed an interactive environment and successfully used it to design a pet robot.