Numerous robots have been developed, and some of them are already being used in homes, institutions, and workplaces. Despite the development of useful robot functions, the focus so far has not been on user interfaces of robots. General users of robots find it hard to understand what the robots are doing and what kind of work they can do. This paper presents an interface for the commanding home robots by using stroke gestures on a computer screen. This interface allows the user to control robots and design their behaviors by sketching the robot's behaviors and actions on a top-down view from ceiling cameras. To convey a feeling of directly controlling the robots, our interface employs the live camera view. In this study, we focused on a house-cleaning task that is typical of home robots, and developed a sketch interface for designing behaviors of vacuuming robots.

In recent years, digital video is rapidly becoming important for education, entertainment, and a host of multimedia applications. With the increasing size of video collections, technology is needed to effectively browse a video in a short time without losing any important contents. We propose a system which automatically summarizes video by analyzing the video color information and utterance information. To do so, we use the color histogram of a shot as color information. We discover important intervals having several color change patterns by using the probability model. Furthermore, we extract utterance information by using closed caption. We find the dialogue structure by analyzing the connectivity between utterances. Finally, we integrate them so as to skim meaningful portions in a video.