Human friendship estimation model for communication robots

Takayuki Kanda, Shogo Nabe, Kazuo Hiraki, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Norihiro Hagita
2007 Autonomous Robots  
This paper reports about the analysis of interhuman interaction in the presence of a humanoid robot, which provides us the important non-verbal information for establishing relationship among humans and robots, as well as the model for communication robot to estimate friendships among humans around. Human-robot interactions recorded in videos are rich in useful information to develop the social abilities of communication robots, while there are many difficulties to analyze them since these
more » ... s are qualitative data. We applied the observation method, which is a common psychological method for analyzing qualitative data, to analyze the interaction among children and robot in an elementary school. We established a model to estimate friendships among children from their non-verbal interaction with each other; e.g. touching, distance, and gaze. Furthermore, we found a gender difference in their non-verbal interactions, and by separating the model for each gender, we achieved to discriminate friendly and non friendly relationship among children with 74.5% accuracy for male, and 83.8% for female.
doi:10.1007/s10514-007-9052-9 fatcat:ghq6yccbefehzh46ife7kaac2m