This study investigated the effect of biomimetic feeding behavior on the perception of lifelikeness in robots. A robot designed to simulate the feeding behavior of the emperor penguin was developed. It features a 3D-printed beak, movable wings, and a furry exterior, which allows for safe tactile interaction. Participants interacted with the robot in two conditions: with and without feeding. The results indicate that feeding may enhance the lifelikeness and perceived intelligence of the robot. This outcome suggests the potential for interaction through feeding to facilitate a deeper connection between humans and robots, which will be useful for designing more lifelike robots in the future.

Hugging provides a sense of psychological security and is an essential form of support contributing to stress relief. Studies are being conducted to reproduce this effect using robots in human-robot interaction. In this study, we developed a prototype that acquired the user's biometric information using the huggable robot Moffuly-MS and tested its operation. The robot was equipped with a touch sensor, IMU, ultrasonic sensor, and temperature and humidity sensor. We confirmed that it was possible to use these to acquire information on the user's behavior, movements during the hug, and physiological changes. In the future, it is hoped that by improving the system's accuracy and integrating it with dialogue systems, new possibilities will be opened for stress relief and psychological care in the medical and welfare fields.

Therapeutic robots are used in facilities for older people, but many of them can only provide mechanical responses to users. To improve the quality of interactions, it is crucial to address emotional consistency. Thus, we propose Semantic Babbling, a system that enables interaction with users by utilizing the baby robot's “inner voice”. By generating inner voices and selecting babbling based on sentiment, Semantic Babbling aims to mimic infant-like responses. A crowd-sourcing survey demonstrated the significance of emotional consistency and the display of inner voice in Semantic Babbling, revealing that it improves the impression of baby robots.

Passengers in autonomous vehicles enjoy the comfort of being free from driving tasks, but they inevitably experience anxiety caused by autonomous vehicle stress (AVS). AVS encompasses vehicle behavior stress due to unpredictable acceleration, and external environmental stress due to potential collisions. Past research has explored approaches to improve passengers’ comfort through behavior control and information presentation. However, methods that utilize stressful vehicle behavior in Extended Reality (XR) entertainment to distract from AVS-related anxiety are limited. Hence, the goal of this study was to maximize passenger comfort in automated vehicles. To achieve this goal, we implemented an XR entertainment system that utilizes vehicle behavior and evaluated its effect on reducing anxiety. In this study, we proposed “Hype D-Live”, an XR live music system designed to reduce anxiety by providing multimodal visual, auditory, force, and vestibular stimuli using a hemispherical display and motion platform mounted on a vehicle. We developed system functions to adjust the force and vestibular senses according to the excitement level of the music and the direction of stressful acceleration and to reproduce moshing, a characteristic behavior at live music venues. However, we hypothesized that passengers might not fully enjoy the entertainment and could experience anxiety if the video content makes them aware of the external environment. Therefore, we conducted an experiment with a within-participant design, involving 24 participants (14 males and 10 females), comparing 3 types of video content for XR entertainment inside the autonomous vehicle: a real external environment, a virtual simulation of the external environment, and a virtual live music venue. The Wilcoxon signed rank test with the Bonferroni correction after the Friedman test revealed that, without the moshing function, the virtual live music venue video significantly enhanced enjoyment and reduced anxiety, compared to the real one.

One of the stress factors for passengers in an autonomous vehicle is the stress from vehicle behavior caused by unpredictable acceleration, deceleration, and route changes. Although there are researches on stress reduction methods using behavior control and information presentation to realize a comfortable autonomous vehicle, there are still few methods for stress reduction and dissipation through application to XR entertainment. In this work, we propose "Hype Dlive", a system that utilizes vehicle behavior as XR live music performance, and aims to improve passenger comfort by utilizing vehicle behavior as tactile and vestibular stimuli to generate a sense of presence and excitement.