We investigate how human piece-moving behavior can inform expressive robot-arm motion design in the imperfect-information game Geister. First, we recorded wrist trajectories during gameplay and segmented forward moves into six phases to analyze phase-specific timing (speed and stop duration) by piece intent. We then implemented a baseline and six phase-modified robot motions on a 6-DoF arm and evaluated observers’ impressions using Godspeed Questionnaire subscales and four task-specific items. Results show that early-phase variations had limited effects, whereas late-phase timing variations—particularly faster withdrawal from a piece—significantly increased ratings of anthropomorphism, animacy, and perceived intent. These findings suggest late-phase timing variations as a practical and effective parameter for conveying internal states through robot-arm motion.

This study investigates an acupressure robot system that synchronizes pressing and releasing actions with the user’s respiratory phases to support mood enhancement. Using a custom-built breathing sensor to estimate abdominal breathing, the system performs acupressure at specific timings, such as press start, peak pressure, and release end, aligned with inhalation or exhalation states. Unlike conventional massage systems, the proposed system introduces a form of underconscious human-robot interaction, where tactile stimulation is subtly coordinated with the user’s physiological rhythms. Subjective mood evaluations before and after the intervention under various timing conditions suggested reductions in tension and fatigue, particularly when both pressing and releasing were in the exhalation phase of the user’s breathing. While further validation is needed, these findings suggest the potential of respiratory-phase-based acupressure as a non-pharmacological method to promote psychological well-being through embodied entrainment. These insights may also broaden the potential roles of robots in affective and embodied interaction with humans.

In this paper, we discuss an emotional touch model of a stuffed toy robot based on the user’s perception. To enable the robot’s physical contact with the user toward future bidirectional touch interaction, we investigate a comprehensive model of active touch by a stuffed toy robot on the user’s body focusing on potentially cyclic parameters of the touch, which are 1) cycle duration and 2) dragging length, to include various touches such as patting, stroking, and hugging. The testbed robot contained three servomotors to move its left arm to touch the user and make physical contact. From the result of subjective evaluation varying the two touching parameters, 1) the factor analysis extracted not only emotional parameters, “activeness,” “mildness,” and “happiness,” but also a faithful attitude, “honesty,” and 2) the contribution rate and the ANOVA for the standard factor scores showed the importance of “activeness” and “mildness,” especially affected by the cycle duration.

There are various studies on multimodal internal state expression by robots and virtual agents. Some communication robots, especially soft robots such as stuffed toy robots, are often used for intimate communication with physical contact. In this research, we focused on "internal desire" as one of the internal states of an agent, and discussed a method of expressing desire by combining voluntary behavior and heartbeat expression as an involuntary physiological phenomenon. In this experiment, first, we verified the expression of desire by behavior or heartbeat expression individually. Next, we verified how the strength of internal desire and the suppression of desire change through a combination of agent behavior and heart rate, and we analyze their relationship. The results showed that both desire behaviors, which are gazing behavior and approaching the object, and the different patterns of heart rate changes affected the intensity of desire. In addition, the combination of large heart-rate changes and low desire-level behaviors expressed the agent's suppressed desire state.

Humans observe the behavior of others and exhibit conforming behavior according to the situation. In this study, we propose a method to change the user's walking behavior and attention by changing the ratio of multiple virtual agents in action. We verified whether the attention to a poster on the wall and the walking behavior of a pedestrian changed according to the type and proportion of actions exhibited by multiple agents presented to a particular pedestrian. The results showed that the participant's walking speed and attention to the wall advertisement changed according to the agents' walking behavior, such as deceleration and stopping.

In this paper, we propose a system to enhance the user's learning motivation by showing multiple anthropomorphic agents as members of outgroups that are competitors and an agent that cooperates with the user in learning and working as a member of the internal group. To stimulate competition by changing the rank fluctuation of the group, the agents show their activeness in the learning contents and group discussions. Four kinds of action animations of "work,'' "break,'' "look at other groups,'' and "speak within the group'' were prepared, and each agent performs the actions for each duration corresponding to the progress of the group. The results suggested that the rank fluctuation elevated competitive spirit and learning motivation.

This research aims at the emotional expression of a robotic hand through various gripping manners on the user's hand. The proposed system is implemented with a robotic hand's various haptic actuators to realize the change of the fingers' gripping force and the robotic hand's holding duration so that the user can haptically estimate the emotion of the robot. The system is expected to provide stress relief or emotional stability, especially for elderly or challenged people. Our experiments showed that the stronger gripping force was perceived as more hypersensitive and higher affinity and that a longer grasping time increased the higher affinity.

In this paper, we verify whether an agent's internal state of desire can be expressed by combining the agent's visible behavior and tactile heartbeat as an involuntary physiological phenomenon. The results of the experiment confirmed that the agent's desires related to food are expressed by both heartbeat and behavior, furthermore, their combination expresses a strong desire. On the other hand, "being interested," the initial state of desire, and "being patient," internal suppression, both appear in the heartbeat but not in visual behaviors.

In this research, we considered a scheme for recording, browsing, and sharing personal voice memos using three-dimensional (3D) auditory space, and we proposed a voice memo system that can achieve auditory localization of multiple voice memos. In the system, the users can record the voice memos and place them on the surrounding relative directions. The direction of each memo is determined by head direction during the recording. After the recording, the users can browse numerous voice memos using head directions and can define the sharing attribute of each voice memo in the edit mode so that personal and public voice memos are appropriately shared with the permitted users. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme when the participants conduct a series flow, from recording the voice memos to browsing the recorded voice memos, especially focusing on the effects of the user's relative. directions and head motions.

In this paper, we introduce our VR system which uses projection, speakers, and a fan to express the distinctive experience of concentration in a Japanese tea ceremony. This system aims to broaden the participant's field of perception (view, hearing, and wind) from a narrow field of view in the tea bowl to multiple sensations of the outside of the tea ceremony room. The continuous concentration, which is presumed by the user's stable motion while mixing tea using a bamboo tea whisk, broadens the field of view and other senses. The accelerometer sensor values of a bamboo whisk were used in an auto-correlation function for detecting the user's stable mixing motion in the tea bowl. In the demonstration experiment in IVRC 2013 (International Virtual Reality Contest 2013), the participants commented positively on the system.

In this research, we aimed to encourage a common recognition of object ownership on the part of agents and humans to elicit more human empathy for the agent. To do so, we propose an ownership-desire model in which the agent's behaviors are generated based on its internal states of attention, interest and desire for ownership. We conducted an experiment to verify the effectiveness of the designed behaviors corresponding to our proposed model, and the results showed that all behaviors corresponding to the internal states were perceived as we designed. We conjectured that the behavioral durations of the agent's attention and interest would affect the guesses of the agent's internal states.

In this paper, we examine a method for stabilizing walking by using a wearable tactile expression mechanism based on a pneumatic actuator array. So far, we have researched wearable stuffed toy robots and their tactile expression mechanism for supporting going out of elderly people, especially from a cognitive perspective. In this paper, we consider a walking stabilization method using the proposed tactile expression mechanism. In this research, we focus on a "light touch" method; we aim to stabilize the wearer's walking by virtually generating a light touch using the tactile expression mechanism.

In this study, we investigate a stuffed-toy robot capable of estimating a user's emotional state via physical contact; the research is oriented toward the development of bidirectional human-robot communications. Textile-type pressure-map sensors are embedded in the robot's head and back, to facilitate detection of the location and strength of various touches via time-sequence data. Based on the recognition of such touching patterns as stroking, patting, and hugging, we conducted a verification of the estimation of the user's emotions using extracted features, such as strength and duration. The results indicate that emotional arousal was reflected by the number and strength of the touches, while the emotional valence emerged through the factor related to the context of the interaction. Our study thereby represents a possibility of understanding the user via physical contact.

We propose an attention-attracting method for wall advertisements by using a virtual agent whose walk precedes passersby from the viewpoint of conforming behaviors. Conforming behaviors such as adapting opinions and actions to surrounding people are often seen in human communications. We focused on these psychological responses and designed a system that projects a virtual agent's walking animation on the wall surface around an advertisement in order to cause users to become interested in the advertisement. In this study, we verified whether a virtual agent provokes the user's conformity in walking behavior, and discussed whether the agent's walking behaviors indirectly attract the user's attention to a wall advertisement, changing his or her impression of the advertisement. The results suggest that the agent's walking speed and various behaviors toward the advertisement affects the passerby's walking behavior, his or her attention and interest on the advertisement, and the impressions of the advertisement itself.

In our past study, we have aimed at emotional expressions of a robot using artificial physiological phenomena, such as breathing and heartbeat, and we demonstrated that both the robot's respiratory rate and heart rate could express the arousal. On the other hand, in previous works, it was not clear whether these physiological phenomena affected the valence (positive -- negative) level of the robot's emotion. In this paper, we also examined other physiological aspects of breathing and heartbeat, specifically the inspiration / expiration ratio and heartbeat variability. Using a robot that was designed based on actual animal respiration and heartbeat mechanisms, we verified whether these physiological changes affect emotional valence in the robot's internal state. The results showed that the robot's emotional valence changed with the interaction of the respiration rate and inspiration / expiration ratio, suggesting the possibility of measuring the robot's emotional expression with two axes, arousal and valence.

In this research, we propose a system that shows a group of multiple agents as other learners to the e-leaning user. For continuous learning in e-learning, promoting the user's motivation for learning and appropriate breaks are considered to improve the user's work efficiency. The proposed system controls the proportion of the agents' behaviors in their group by allocating the state of study--either studying or taking a break--for each agent in order to indirectly indicate concentration or appropriate breaks. Consequently, the system offers multiple actions, but the user has room to make the choice regarding the action. Depending on the concentration degree and the duration of study of the user, the necessity of a break is calculated. That is used to control the ratio of agents who have a break and to avoid the forced feeling resulting from only one action being presented by a single agent. In this paper, we examined how the ratio of behavior in the agent group influences the user. As a result, a greater ratio of studying to resting in the group influenced the participants' behaviors.

One of the important factors in medical and nursing care recently has been arousing the emotions of patients. Many types of communication robots and pet robots have been developed as communication partners for patients. The user's emotions are stimulated during direct communication with the robot, although there is less chance that the robot will approach the user in other situations such as watching TV and listening to music without disturbing him or her.The user feels that the robot is troublesome during the user's other tasks. The purpose of this research is to elevate the user's emotional experience through emotional expression by physiological expressions of a partner robot in the user's daily life. Ambient but emotional expressions of physiological phenomena are perceived by touch, even when the user is concentrating on other tasks. First, we focused on breathing, heartbeat and body temperature as the physiological phenomena. From the results of the evaluations of the robot's heartbeat and body temperature, along with our previous results for the breathing, each expression has arousal and pleasure axes of the robot's situation. In this paper, we focus on The joint attention of the robot and user to an emotional photograph, and we verified whether the strength of the user's own emotional response to the content was changed by the physiological expressions of the robot while they looked at photographs together. The results suggest that the physiological expression of the robot would make the common emotional experience of users the user's own emotion in the experience more excited and more relaxed.

This paper proposes an interactive manager agent system that adjusts schedule among multiple persons through negotiations on behalf of a human organizer, such as a steward or team manager. In order to increase the users' cooperative decision-making, we implemented the manager agent that negotiates with each member on the schedule using 1) the suitable attitude depending on current situation and partner of negotiation and 2) the graphical representation of background negotiations between the agent and the other users: a) the other users' icons, b) the blinking balloons of both the other users and the agent, and c) the agent's looking-back actions for the other users' icons. The results of the evaluations showed that both the individual use and the combination of the proposed expressions could make the participants feel i) as though there were under-going negotiations between the agent and the other users and ii) as though the agent had both the effort and compassion to the user. Moreover, the user's cooperative decision-making was increased by the proposed method.

In this research, we focus on physiological phenomena expression of robots, propose the Body-Emotion Model (BEM), which concerns the relationship between the internal states of robots and their involuntary physical reactions. We expect that the robot will be able to express the delicate nuances of its intention by controlling robots' emotions and feelings with each individual parameter based on BEM. We propose a stuffed-toy robot system, BREAR, which has a mechanical structure to express breathing, heartbeating, temperature, and bodily movement. The breathing mechanism commonly controls the abdominal motion, breathing motion, and air flows of breath. In this paper, we focus on robot's breathing, verify two subjective evaluations: 1) the user's sense that the robot was alive and 2) the perceived states of the robot based on its breathing speed. The results showed that our proposed method of breathing expression can show a state of living and that the breathing speed was interpreted as the robot's emotion of arousal.

In this paper, we propose spatial communication between a virtual agent and a user through common space in both virtual world and real space. For this purpose, we propose the virtual agent system SCoViA, which renders a synchronized synthesis of the agent's appearance corresponding to the user's relative position to the monitor based on synchronization with the user's motion parallax in order to realize human-agent communication in the real world. In this system, a real-time three-dimensional computer-generated (3DCG) agent is drawn from the changing viewpoint of the user in a virtual space corresponding to the position of the user's head as detected by face tracking. We conducted two verifications and discussed the spatial communication between a virtual agent and a user. First, we verified the effect of a synchronized redrawing of the virtual agent for the accurate recognition of a particular object in the real world. Next, we verified the approachability of the agent by reacting to the user's eye contact from a diagonal degree to the virtual agent. The results of the evaluations showed that the virtual agent's eye contact affected approachability regardless of the user's viewpoint and that our proposed system using motion parallax could significantly improve the accuracy of the agent's gazing position with each real object. Finally, we discuss the possibility of the real-world human-agent interaction using positional relationship among the agent, real objects, and the user.

This paper proposes an effective communication with an agent's appearance and reality of the acceptance level of the user's order using verbal and nonverbal expressions. The crossmodal combination is expected to enable delicate expressions of the agent's internal state especially when the agent's decision of the acceptance is different from the agent's mind, so the user becomes aware of the difficult situations. We have proposed to adopt the facial expression and the flexion of the word ending as the parameters of the agent's internal state. The expressions are attached to the scripts of each acceptance level. The results of the expressions showed the following: 1) the effectiveness of both the facial and flexion expressions, and 2) the crossmodal combinations that generate the agent's concealed but real feeling.

In this paper, we introduce a wearable message robot that transmits messages to the user and alerts him/her immediately and affectionately through physical contact. This robot is aimed at supporting elderly people who would like to participate in outings but suffer from anxiety. The system creates haptic stimuli corresponding to the user's clothing and posture. We implemented two versions of the system: the first combines haptic stimuli and anthropomorphic motion to express physical contact, while the second is a simplified system for application on smartphones to provide ubiquitous services.

In this paper, we propose a virtual agent system that introduces the current news on the Webs depending on the user's reactions to the understanding. We focused on the gesture of the user to estimate the user's state of understanding based on the head motion. The goal of the research is the user's under- standing of the news regardless of the knowledge level. The system controls 1) the level of the news content corresponding to the user's gesture of inclining her/his head and 2) the audibility of the agent's speech (the volume and the speed) by the user's head motion to turn her/his ear to the agent. The results of the evaluations showed the effectiveness of the interactive change of the reading behaviors to be understandable and audible.

We propose an expressive breathing method for a robot in accordance with its utterances. The synchronized expression is expected as a new physical modality to become like a living presence. Especially when the human-robot distance is near in intimate communications, anthropomorphized presences should naturally imitate activities of living beings, such as breathing. A stuffed-toy robot contains a speaker and a fan motor in its head to make simultaneous expressions of breathing and vocal sounds. The strength of the breath is determined by the total volume and power in the high frequency band.

In this paper, we propose an involuntary expression of embodied robots by adopting goose bumps. The goose bumps are caused by not only external stimuli such as cold temperature but also the internal state of the robot such as fear. For more natural anthropomorphism, the combination of involuntary and voluntary expressions should enable realistic animacy and life-like agency. The bumps on the robot's skin are generated by changing lengths of thin rods from each hole. The lengths are controlled by a servo motor which pulls nylon strings connected to the base of thin rods.

In this paper, we propose an AR environment in which multiple users can synchronously share and see AR contents based on our proposed animation markers with time-sequence information. Many AR systems have been proposed, some of which consider simultaneous use by multiple users. However, these systems require a synchronization mechanism among users (devices) for simultaneous displaying. Such mechanisms complicate the systems. Thus, we propose an animation marker that can transmit temporal (frame) information in a synchronized AR environment among multiple users using our animation markers.

In this paper, we propose a portable robot to express physical contacts that are parallel to other modalities. It enfolds the user's arm in its arms and tapping the user's arm. The physical contact expressions are generated through a combination of several haptic stimuli and the robot's anthropomorphic behaviors based on its internal state. The aim of our research is building a caregiver-like robot medium. The system was designed for gentle and delicate communication between the user and the robot during a user's outings. The haptic stimuli express warm/cold, patting, and squeezing. Experimental results show that haptic communicative behaviors of the robot increase the intelligibility to the robot's messages and familiar impressions to the robot.

The Casemans 2011 workshop opens a platform to researchers of context-aware computing and self-managing systems to investigate the usefulness of context-awareness in emerging applications such as rescue applications, disaster avoidance and overcoming mechanisms, social networking, etc. These applications typically require timely context information to localise people and to share information based on shared interest as well as situations. An interesting research question is how to define and capture mutual context and how to share information in an efficient manner. Hence, the workshop focuses on context acquisition, modelling, reasoning, actuating techniques.

In this paper, we propose and evaluate a video communication system that compensates for user's uncongenial attitudes by coordinating the robot's behaviors and media control of the video. The system facilitates comfortable video communications between elderly or disabled people by an assistant robot for each user that expresses (a) active listening behaviors to compensate for the listener's attitude when he/she is not really listening to another user's talking and (b) a cover-up behavior (gaze turned to the user) to divert attention from the other user's uncongenial attitude when that person is not looking at the talking user but toward the robot at her/his side; this behavior is performed by coordinating the automatic switching of cameras to give the impression that the congenial person is still looking at the user. The results obtained in the system evaluation show the significant effectiveness of this design approach using the robot's behavior and media control of the video to compensate for the problems in video communication that we aimed to overcome.

We propose a real-time gaze estimation method based on facial-feature tracking using a single video camera that does not require any special user action for calibration. Many gaze estimation methods have been already proposed; however, most conventional gaze tracking algorithms can only be applied to experimental environments due to their complex calibration procedures and lacking of usability. In this paper, we propose a gaze estimation method that can apply to daily-life situations. Gaze directions are determined as 3D vectors connecting both the eyeball and the iris centers. Since the eyeball center and radius cannot be directly observed from images, the geometrical relationship between the eyeball centers and the facial features and eyeball radius (face/eye model) are calculated in advance. Then, the 2D positions of the eyeball centers can be determined by tracking the facial features. While conventional methods require instructing users to perform such special actions as looking at several reference points in the calibration process, the proposed method does not require such special calibration action of users and can be realized by combining 3D eye-model-based gaze estimation and circle-based algorithms for eye-model calibration. Experimental results show that the gaze estimation accuracy of the proposed method is 5° horizontally and 7° vertically. With our proposed method, various application such as gaze-communication robots, gaze-based interactive signboards, etc. that require gaze information in daily-life situations are possible.

In this paper, we propose a guide system for daily life in semipublic spaces by adopting a gaze-communicative stuffed-toy robot and a gaze-interactive display board. The system provides naturally anthropomorphic guidance through a) gaze-communicative behaviors of the stuffed-toy robot (ldquojoint attentionrdquo and ldquoeye-contact reactionsrdquo) that virtually express its internal mind, b) voice guidance, and c) projection on the board corresponding to the userpsilas gaze orientation. The userpsilas gaze is estimated by our remote gaze-tracking method. The results from both subjective/objective evaluations and demonstration experiments in a semipublic space show i) the holistic operation of the system and ii) the inherent effectiveness of the gaze-communicative guide.

In this paper we propose an intuitive page-turning and browsing interface of e-books on a flexible e-paper based on user studies. Our user studies showed various types of page-turning actions such as flipping, grasping, and sliding by different situations or users. We categorized these actions into three categories: turn, flip through, and leaf through the page(s). Based on this categorized model, we have developed a conceptual design and prototype of an interface for an e-book reader, which enables intuitive page-turning interactions using a simple architecture in both hardware and software design. The prototype has a flexible plastic sheet with bend sensors, which is attached to a small LCD monitor to physically unite the visual display with a tangible control interface based on the natural page-turning actions as used in reading a real book. The prototype handles all three page-turning actions observed in the user studies by interpreting the bend degree of the sheet.

This paper proposes a gaze-communicative stuffed-toy robot system with joint attention and eye-contact reactions based on ambient gaze-tracking. For free and natural interaction, we adopted our remote gaze-tracking method. Corresponding to the user's gaze, the gaze-reactive stuffed-toy robot is designed to gradually establish 1) joint attention using the direction of the robot's head and 2) eye-contact reactions from several sets of motion. From both subjective evaluations and observations of the user's gaze in the demonstration experiments, we found that i) joint attention draws the user's interest along with the user-guessed interest of the robot, ii) "eye contact" brings the user a favorable feeling for the robot, and iii) this feeling is enhanced when "eye contact" is used in combination with "joint attention." These results support the approach of our embodied gaze-communication model.

The aim of this paper is to clarify the relationship between the expressive strengths of gestures and voice for embodied and personified interfaces. We conduct perceptual tests using a puppet interface, while controlling singing-voice expressions, to empirically determine the naturalness and strength of various combinations of gesture and voice. The results show that (1) the strength of cross-modal perception is affected more by gestural expression than by the expressions of a singing voice, and (2) the appropriateness of cross-modal perception is affected by expressive combinations between singing voice and gestures in personified expressions. As a promising solution, we propose balancing a singing voice and gestural expressions by expanding and correcting the width and shape of the curve of expressive strength in the singing voice.

We have developed a method for synthesizing a singing voice by gradually changing the musical expression based on speech morphing. This paper shows the advantages of this method in comparison with the approach of binary discrete transformation between two expressions, confirmed by statistical analyses of perception tests. In order to synthesize different expressional strengths of a singing voice, a "normal" (without expression) voice of a particular singer is used as the base of morphing, and three different expressions, "dark," "whispery" and "wet," are used as the target. Through our experiments, we confirmed i) the proposed morphing algorithm effectively interpolates the expressional strength of a singing voice, ii) an approximate equation of the perceptual sense can be used to calculate the morph ratio at a perceptually linear interval, and iii) our gradual transformation method can generate a natural singing voice from the interpolation of two different expressions.

We propose an application that uses music as a multimodal expression to activate and support communication that runs parallel with traditional conversation. We examine a personified doll-shaped interface designed for musical expression. To direct such gestures toward communication, we have adopted an augmented stuffed toy with tactile interaction as a musically expressive device. We constructed the doll with various sensors for user context recognition. This configuration enables translation of the interaction into melodic statements. We demonstrate the effect of the doll on face-to-face conversation by comparing the experimental results of different input interfaces and output sounds. Consequently, we have found that conversation with the doll was positively affected by the musical output, the doll interface, and their combination.