Service robots are beginning to be used as a new kind of support for human labor. However, in many cases, we implement only specific task-dependent behaviors in robots according to the purpose of robot introduction, and rarely implement task-independent behaviors. In general, it is known that noninstrumental functions are one factor that improves user experience. Therefore, task-independent behavior of robots as an aspect of noninstrumental functions also has the potential to improve the impression made by robots and deliver a user experience beyond the users’ expectations, during human-robot interaction. This study aims to investigate the influence of task-dependent behavior and task-independent behavior on the impression made by robots, and user experience. We extracted, from previous studies, dialogue task-dependent and dialogue task-independent behaviors during human-robot interaction, and investigated the influence of these behaviors through a video-based survey. The result of the video-based survey shows that dialogue task-dependent behavior improves the functionality of robots and decreases factors of negative user experience, such as frustration, while also fulfilling users’ expectation for interaction with robots. It also shows that dialogue task-independent behavior builds a stronger relationship between users and robots and provides a user experience that exceeds users’ expectation regarding interaction with robots.

In recent years, communication robots have been employed to assist workers. However, it is known that users experience embarrassment when interacting with a robot in a public space, which may hinder their use. Previous studies investigated methods to reduce embarrassment when using robots and the factors that cause embarrassment. Although these studies have investigated the embarrassment experienced by users through only a single interaction, they have not investigated the embarrassment influenced by users’ past experiences. Therefore, in this study, we investigated changes in embarrassment and the factors causing embarrassment through repeated interactions with robots in public spaces. We conducted experiments in which the same participants used a robot in a public space multiple times and continuously experienced embarrassment through repeated interactions with the robot. The results show that repeated interactions with the robot reduce embarrassment, and that embarrassment is influenced by two factors: understanding of the user’s behavior from surrounding people and the user’s previous experience with the interaction.

Socially-enabled digital technologies have attracted academic interest for decades, with recent commercial examples of Siri and Alexa, capturing public attention. However, despite ubiquitous visions of a robotic future, very few fully-fledged social robots are currently available to consumers. To improve their designs, studies of their long-term use are particularly valuable, but are currently unavailable. To address this gap, we report on interviews with four long-term users of Pepper - a social robot introduced in 2014. Our thematic analysis elicited insights across three kinds of value Pepper brought to its users: utilitarian functionality; the community that formed around Pepper; and a personal value of affection. We focus on two contributions those values bring to social robot design: social robots as social proxies, alleviating disabilities or acting akin to social media profiles; and robot nurturing as a design construct, going beyond purely utilitarian or hedonistic perspectives on robots.

Sensor networks allow us to collect data, such as camera images, over a wide area. Understanding the sensing area by aggregating and processing the data from multiple sensors is promising. Deep Learning (DL) is a powerful method for interpreting data. However, communication cost on the sensor network and computational cost on the server are two substantial problems of aggregating and processing data from multiple sensors. We therefore propose divided processing of the DL between a server and a powerful Edge-Heavy Sensor (EHS). In our study, we reduced transmission data to twelve times lower than the amount of raw input data while maintaining a 4.5% decrease in the DL's recognition accuracy.

Walking 8,000 steps in a day is one of the important criteria to maintain our health. However, we often miss a chance to walk due to the difficulty to keep our motivation toward our health in a daily life. We propose an algorithm to search an appropriate daily walking pattern from the user's past walking record. The searched walking patterns are used for making a health promotion agent recommend an effective timing to walk. With this recommendation, users will not miss the timing when they can walk. In this study, we focused on designing the algorithm for searching a daily walking pattern, which satisfied both conditions, achieving 8,000 steps a day and being similar to the current user walking record. In a pilot performance study, it was revealed that the proposed algorithm can narrow down the walking pattern candidates and properly search the walking pattern similar to the current user walking record.

Solo videojournalism has become a popular form of reporting for many television stations and online news sites. We foresee that television stations will amalgamate with Internet broadcasting services and the amount of this kind of live streaming content will increase day by day. In solo live reporting which refers to live streaming style Solo Videojounal-ism, a reporter will be struggling to deal with a lot of work, particularly because he/she cannot edit the report after shooting. This can be an overwhelming burden and may cause low-quality broadcasting and/or a reduction in the amount of information broadcast. The goal of our study is to design and implement a support system for solo live reporting. The functions of our proposed system, such as intuitive camera operation, time keeping, addition of captions will aid solo live reporting and increase the quality of video contents.

We aim to provide an interactive and entertaining environment for users to better enjoy and stay motivated during indoor training. We are now developing a virtual treadmill-based training system that will allow users to experience walking or running around various real scenes. The images are displayed according to the user's speed. We use a set of key frame 360-degree panoramic images on a grid to synthesize, in real-time, an omnidirectional movie for any possible path the user takes. The playback smoothness of the synthesized movie depends on the separation (grid pitch) between key frames. Preliminary experimental results help us determine the largest playback grid pitch without compromising the playback smoothness.

In this study, we propose an in-car conversation sharing system. People frequently converse in a car. In these conversations, people often talk about points of interest that they have just passed. Because we believe that they contain useful information, the aim of our study is to share the conversations. To develop such a system, we needed to know about the characteristics of in-car conversations. Consequently we collected 120 in-car conversations with their locations over a 10-month period. Our analysis showed that many types of conversation take place in a car; but of the greatest interest is when the subject of conversation is a specific location or area. We discuss the requirements for an in-car conversation sharing system to guide our on-going research.

In this paper, we propose a novel way to encourage visitors to share their experiences and interests in exhibition spaces. To acquire information about the experiences of the visitors, we used a robot that inhabits the exhibition space. The robot acquires the visitor experience data and then shares this data with other visitors. We believe that this information (i.e., the experiences of previous visitors) will enhance the exhibition experience for subsequent visitors because the information may include interesting topics for the new visitors. However, there are some difficulties in communication between robots and humans. We used “PhotoChat”, which is an in-house photo communication software. PhotoChat is capable of communicating with others by taking photographs and adding annotations to each photograph. It also records the locations for coordination between the photographs and the statistical information contained in the annotations. We therefore used PhotoChat as the communication medium between the robot and the visitors. The robot acquires the visitor experiences and shares these experiences with other visitors through PhotoChat. The robot can also use bodily actions to express instructions to the visitors. We then developed a system that coordinates the photographs and their respective exhibition areas. We also implemented robot behavior (i.e., bodily actions and motions) that includes recommendations for photographs taken by others. We held workshops to perform data collection and manually classified the data into three content categories. We then performed experiments using the developed system to distribute the classified content. The results showed that the robot's behavior encouraged conversations between the visitors based on provided topics.

We present universal earphones that use both a proximity sensor and a skin conductance sensor and we demonstrate several implicit interaction techniques they achieve by automatically detecting the context of use. The universal earphones have two main features. The first involves detecting the left and right sides of ears, which provides audio to either ear, and the second involves detecting the shared use of earphones and this provides mixed stereo sound to both earphones. These features not merely free users from having to check the left and right sides of earphones, but they enable them to enjoy sharing stereo audio with other people.

There are many consumer electronics placed on our home. When we control these consumer electronics remotely, we are often forced to switch between remote controllers. Further, the increased functions of electronics also increase a number of buttons of remote controllers. These complexities make it difficult for users to control consumer electronics. To simplify interaction between remote controllers and the electronics, we propose a user buildable remote controller device, called Blockon. The Blockon enables a user to build his own controller easily by placing button blocks on the board as building LEGO blocks. The Blockon not only supports placing buttons freely but also makes it possible to define macro commands by stacking button blocks. In this paper, we also present a prototype of the Blockon for technical verification along with our future plan.