The advantage of the proposed approach is that users can invent their own communication protocol (based on the knock patterns) to communicate with the creature. This approach is a novel concept to establish future human-robot communication protocols within many contexts or human centric applications. However, through symbolic communication (knock-based communication) a human is able to convey to the robot to adapt and communicate with their personalized communication protocol.

In this study we develop Core Less Unformed Machine (COLUMN) as novel & transformable robotic platform to explore how visually mediated information is useful to coordinate (interpersonal coordination) to establish connectedness of three participants to obtain COLUMN's behaviors (transformable rolling motions).

In this paper, we propose a MAWARI-based social interface as an interactive social medium to broadcast the information to users. The interface consists of three creatures (MAWARIs) and is designed with minimalism designing concepts. MAWARI is a small scale robot that has only body gestures to express (or interact) its attractive social cues. The participant's role is reduced to that of a bystander when the interface is of a passive social state. In this context, the user does not need to participate in the conversation but still gains information without exerting effort (i.e., less conversational workload).

We developed a creatures-based social dining table that can communicate through a knocking sound, which in Japanese is pronounced as "KonKon." Our main focus was to create a minimal number of cues for a proto-communication by establishing social interactions between a creature and a human. In particular, humans used the "KonKon" interface to communicate with a creature to demonstrate the social behaviors necessary to adapt to a person's intentions. The creature used a mutual adaptation model for achieving a more ideal adaptation during the interactions. In the experimental results, we discuss the concept of the creature and indicate the effectiveness of the communication-protocol on the "KonKon" interface for mutual adaptation.

We developed a Sociable Trash Box (STB) as a children-assisted robot able to collect the trash in order to convey its intentional stance to children. The STB is capable of engaging manifold affiliation behaviors to build a social rapport with children by collecting the trash around their environment. In particular, the STB is a child-dependent robot that walks alone in a public space for tracing humans and trash for the purpose of collecting the trash. The robot is incapable of collecting the trash by itself, and it engages by using interactive behaviors and vocalizations to make a social coupling with children based on the robot's anticipation to accomplish its goal. The present experiment investigates how STB behaviors are effective in conveying intentions to evoke children's social interactions and to assist in collecting the trash in their environment.

A sociable PC (SPC) is capable of engaging and interacting with social cues while users use it. SPC is a kind of artifact which is capable of coordinating and synchronizing its behaviors based on user attention and information on a display. In particular, SPC can exhibit behaviors to induce a trust through social rapport with the user while responding to the user's behaviors and activities on a PC. We used the concept of a minimalism designing mechanism to invent the SPC. The SPC appearance is much like soft "Tofu," so the user can touch and sense it. The SPS can also provide feedback to the user using attractive social cues such as shaking its body, displaying an attractive motion and joint attention with the user, etc.

The STB is capable of engaging manifold affiliation behaviors to build a social rapport toward the goal of collecting trash around an environment. In particular, STB is a child-dependent robot that walks alone in a public space for the purpose of tracing humans and trash and to collect the trash. In a crowded space, STBs move toward the trash by engaging with an attractive twisting motion (behaviors) and vocal interaction to convey STB's intention to children. Our STB robot is incapable of collecting the trash by itself. In this sense, children have to infer a robot's intentional stance or expectation for interaction with the STB. To collect trash while creating social rapport with children is a novel concept. The STB engages with twisting and bowing motions when children put trash into an STB container.

In this paper, a creature-based futuristic sociable dining table is proposed that communicates through a knock on a table. The main objective was to create a minimal number of cues for protocol communication for the purpose of establishing social interactions between a creature and a human. The creature uses a knock (within a specific period) with a Temporal Difference (TD) learning model to learn and to adapt to a user's intentions, and the creature moves a different direction (right, left, straight, and back) on a table based on the user's knock. By ascertaining the creatures' behaviors, the user can convey his/her intentions by a number of knocking sounds while looking at the creature adaption. The creature is capable of doing mutually adaptive learning through a TD model in real time to satisfy the user's goal or intentions. In the context of the experimental results, we discuss the concept of creatures and indicate the effectiveness of the communication-protocol with the “knocking” interface for reciprocal adaptations.