IoT is increasingly being used in different areas of society. IoT is used in society by collecting values acquired by sensor devices through networks and analysing the data. IoT software is needed to use the IoT, but efficient software development methods are desired because software for an increasingly complex society tends to become more complex. This research aims to improve the efficiency of IoT software and develop an intuitive method for developing IoT software.This paper proposes a development methodology that combines a data-flow-based programming approach with a procedural programming language. When the focus is on data, data flow programming is intuitive and efficient. On the other hand, when the focus is on data processing, it is better to use a procedural programming language because data is processed sequentially[1].In the hybrid IoT programming environment proposed in this paper, the code of a procedural programming language is generated from the description by data flow programming, and the program is executed by a micro controller.The products of this research are available as open source software[2], [3].

Many people, especially Japanese, are embarrassed to converse with agents such as virtual assistants, probably due to a low social presence, which refers to the degree to which one perceives the human-like properties of an agent. We assumed that poor emotional expressions of agents may impair their human-likeness. In this study, we proposed melodic emotional expression (MEE), which is a new auditory emotional expression for spoken dialog agents. We added background music (BGM) and sound effects as MEE to synthetic voices and conducted experiments to investigate the effects. First, we found that adding MEE to the flat synthetic voice could convey emotions as intended. We also found that when positive emotions were expressed by MEE, it made the agent more human-like and easier to talk to. Furthermore, we achieved these effects when MEE was added to an emotional synthetic voice. These effects were particularly noticeable with the BGM. We further attempted automatic BGM generation, which is necessary for the practical application of MEE. Listeners accurately categorized the BGM generated by the prototype system into four types of emotions: joy, angry, sad, and relaxed.

Combining a device that mediates social touch between people in remote locations with a video call can be expected to enhance the feeling of being in the same space (sense of space sharing) and social bonding with the remote partner. However, when the device is combined with a mobile phone video call, size inconsistency could occur between the device that acts as a substitute for the body part and the reduced video of the partner. In addition, when the device operates separately from a mobile phone in wireless communication, positional inconsistency also happens. This study developed a robotic hand-type social touch device and investigated whether it enhances the sense of space sharing and social bonding even though these inconsistencies occur. Experimental results revealed that the user's belief that the finger movements of the device were the partner's hand movement contributed to the sense of space sharing. The movements of the device according to the flow of conversation facilitated this belief; hence, the sense of space sharing increased in spite of the inconsistencies. Positional inconsistency was also found to have an adverse effect on social bonding. Positional consistency contributes to enhance social bonding because it visually facilitates the user's belief that the device is a substitute for the partner's body. Basically, the functions of the device, such as skin softness, body temperature, finger movements, and grip force, which enhance the reality of the touch sensation, could be effective in facilitating the user's beliefs. However, it was suggested that awareness of temperature does not always make positive contribution to the reality and could lead to eeriness.

There are many researches that devise the appearance of agents that recommend products, but there are not many researches that focus on the environment in which a robot and a person interact. In this research, we examined whether there are differences in the impression on the robot and the change in the degree of interest in the product under the face-to-face condition and the 90° condition when the robot explains the product. As a result, there was no significant difference in the degree of interest in the products between the two conditions, but in the evaluation of the impression on the robot, it was found that the 90° condition was more likely to be felt as 'obedient" and "humorous" significantly. Therefore, it was found that although the 90° condition gives a better impression on the robot than the face-to-face condition, it does not affect the degree of interest in the product explained by the robot.

evel (Austin 1962). DAs constitute the most fundamental part of communication, and the comprehension of DAs is essential to human-agent interaction. The purpose of this study is to enable an agent to behave properly in response to DAs without their explicit representation on one hand and to estimate the DAs explicitly on the other hand. The former is realized by reinforcement learning and the latter by Bayesian inference. The simulation results demonstrated that the agent not only responded to DAs successfully but also inferred the DAs correctly.

We conducted an experiment, in which we found that training a drone increased its animacy, attachment to it, and affinity with it. Additionally, we found that the drone impressed trainers as a puppy while it impressed non-trainers as a fly.

In most role-playing games, a non-player character (NPC) tends to have the most initiative, i.e., developing conversation topics, on the dialog. Thus, the player tends to experience a unilateral impression, i.e., the feeling of that an NPC forces conversation topics on the player in spite of the player's willingness, and gradually loses his/her motivation to communicate with an NPC. In order to address this problem, this study proposes a dialog method whereby an NPC can adaptively switch the initiative by determining the player's willingness to talk/listen to the NPC. Based on the results of an evaluation experiment in which the participants talked with the NPC in the game scenario, it is suggested that the aspect of mixed-initiative in our proposed method could decrease the unilateral impression associated with the existing method that an NPC has the most initiative. Furthermore, the determination of the player's desire in our proposed method could further motivate players to talk to the NPC.

Current videoconferencing systems can be roughly divided into two types: a window-type where a computer display works as a window to reveal a remote partner, and a mirror-type whose display shows the mirrored reflections of both participants. While mirror-type systems enhance the feeling of togetherness by merging the two sites into one display, an inherent problem remains. Despite the mirror metaphor, the partner has no physical body in front of the display. To cope with this incongruence, we placed a partition in front of the display. Across that partition we further also placed a robotic table and a robotic bench that move based on the partner's behavior. The experiments indicated that the table and bench successfully facilitated feeling as if there were the partner's physical body was present at the opposite side of the partition.

The behavior of a social robot is designed based on either its emotional state or social situation. In this research, we defined these expressions as the affective and social expressions, and proposed a new emotional expression method to integrate these two expressions. It is known that a human has involuntary facial muscles around the eyes, and voluntary facial muscles around the mouth. Thus, it is considered that facial muscles around the eyes express the affective expressions, while facial muscles around the mouth express the social expressions. In an experiment involving a human-robot conversation, using the proposed method, the results showed a sense of human likeness and sociality. Furthermore, the intimacy evaluation results showed that the social expressions work effectively when the intimacy does not require high social bonding such as the desire for friendship. However, the affective expressions are necessary for evaluating intimacy that requires higher social bonding, such as wanting to live with someone.

There are several merits to embody the remote partner's body to the video conference: showing it physically, making a physical contact, and enhancing social telepresence. In this paper, we tackled to embody a part of a remote partner's body in a video conference. As a method to show how effectively the embodied body part works, we focused on face-to-face communication of the hand gestures such as thumb wrestling, finger number game and pointing. We developed a robotic arm, which seems the remote partner's arm popped out from the video. Our robot arm synchronizes with the remote partner's arm movements. We conducted experiments to verify the method of embodying a part of a remote partner's body. We found that, our method reduced the feeling of being far from the remote partner, and enhanced social telepresence, comparing video and physical embodiment.

Previous research has made various efforts to produce human-like presence of autonomous social robots. However, such efforts often require costly equipment and complicated mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new method that makes a user feel as if an autonomous robot is controlled by a remote operator, with virtually no cost. The basic idea is to manipulate people's knowledge about a robot by using priming technique. Through a series of experiments, we discovered that subjects tended to deduce the presence/absence of a remote operator based on their prior experience with that same remote operator. When they interacted with an autonomous robot after interacting with a teleoperated robot (i.e., a remote operator) whose appearance was identical as the autonomous robot, they tended to feel that they were still talking with the remote operator. The physically embodied talking behavior reminded the subjects of the remote operator's presence that was felt at the prior experience. Their deductions of the presence/absence of a remote operator were actually based on their “beliefs” that they had been interacting with a remote operator. Even if they had interacted with an autonomous robot under the guise of a remote operator, they tended to believe that they were interacting with a remote operator even when they subsequently interacted with an autonomous robot.

In 1, an error in one of the author names has been found subsequent to the publication. “Ishiguro Hiroshi” should be “Hiroshi Ishiguro.” The correct name is now presented above.

Summary Thanks to the maturity of motion tracking technologies, it became easy and inexpensive to use avatars that reflect the user's facial and body motions in real time. There is a possibility that those real‐time avatars can serve as a substitute for videos in distant communication. We conducted two experiments to confirm positive effects of avatars on distant communication. In the first experiment, the subjects watched a conversation partner's video, avatar, photo, or nothing when speaking to the partner. Because the video and avatar delivered the partner's motion while the video and photo delivered the partner's appearance, we were able to observe the effects of the motion and appearance separately. As a result, we found that presenting the motion via a video or an avatar increased the degree of the smoothness of speaking to the partner, but the appearance did not significantly affect such an influence. In the second experiment, we compared the avatar and teleoperated robot to find how a physical embodiment influences the degree of the smoothness of speech. Teleoperated robots resemble avatars in transmitting the user's body motions without disclosing the user's appearance but differ in reflecting these motions onto a robot that has a physical embodiment. We predicted that the robot produces smoother speech because the physical embodiment might make the body motions recognizable. However, the robot decreased the degree of the smoothness of speech against our expectation. The results of these experiments showed that real‐time avatars that present only body motions are enough to smooth distant communication. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Since past studies on haptic and visual communication have tended to be isolated from each other, it has remained unclear whether a touch channel can still enrich mediated communication where video and audio channels are already available. To clarify this, we analyzed remote handshaking in which a robot hand that was attached just under a videoconferencing terminal's display moved according to the opening and closing motion of a conversation partner's hand. Combining touch and video channels raises a question as to whether the partner's action of touching a haptic device should be visible to the user. If it can be invisible, the action may be unnecessary, and a unilaterally controlled device may be enough to establish an effective touch channel. Our analysis revealed that the feeling of being close to the partner can be enhanced by mutual touch in which the partner's action needs to occur but should be invisible.

If robots learn new actions through human-robot interaction, it is important that the robots can utilize rewards as well as instructions to reduce humans' efforts. Additioanlly, "interval" which allows humans to give instructions and evaluations is also important. We hence focused on "delays in initiating actions" and changed them according to the progress of learning: long delays at early stages, and short at later stages. We compared the proposed varying delay with a constant delay by an experiment. The result demonstrated that the varying delay improves learning efficiency significantly and impresses humans as teachable.

Recently, the virtual reality has progressed rapidly in the field of the science and technology. The coverage includes extremely various fields such as communication, design, entertainment, etc. Various VR space have been proposed and constructed by present. However, there are no VR system that realizes real time simulation based on the same physical law as it works in the real world. Then, we construct a virtual air hockey game based on rigid dynamics in this research. Moreover, to provide the presence with users, two sensations (the visual and auditory sensation) are synchronized. This paper describes various problems and their solutions in construction of virtual air hockey game system

In this research, a dialog environment between human and virtual environment has been constructed. At preset, if a person wants to interact with virtual environment, special device such a data glove is required, but it makes difficult for general users to manipulate virtual objects. When we cannot manipulate objects directly, it is natural that we ask someone with a privilege to do the operation in place of us. In the case, it is convenient if methods used in daily life are allowed. That is, the method to be proposed here is based on the integration between verbal information through the utterances and non-verbal information by the gestures such as finger pointing. The experimental results have proved the effectiveness of this approach in terms of facilitating man-machine interaction and communication. The environment constructed in this research allows a user to communicate by talking and showing gestures to a personified agent in virtual environment. A user can use his/her finger to point at a virtual object and ask him to manipulate it.

The performance improvement of radiation diagnosis devices makes it possible to get detailed medical images. The objective of this research is to develop a computer aided diagnosis system that uses advanced information of images for various kinds of internal organs and diseases. In order to make the computer aided diagnosis system do the work, as it must presume position of internal organs, the spine is used as a landmark of positional presumption. The position of each spine is recognized from the CT data, and the lungs area is extracted based on the result. We think it possible for the computer aided diagnosis system to inform radiologists about abnormality regions when the image data processing algorithm about several organs is integrated with positional presumption of organs in the future

The paper reports a system which builds assemblies by simulating in virtual space the assembly operations specified in an assembly manual. A manual consists of both illustration and explanation. Illustration consists of not only figures but also phrases and symbols which relate the phrases to the figures. This research uses the 3D models of the mechanical parts generated by a modeling tool. A noun phrase in the illustration specifies the name of a mechanical part and determines the model used. A verb phrase imposes an initial condition to be held before the execution of an assembly operation. Auxiliary lines in an illustration are virtual lines, which are used to mate the parts at both ends. Both the assembly process and terminal condition of the operation are elucidated in explanation. The state of a subassembly obtained is hard to infer due to geometric variations of the parts involved in the operation. The configuration obtained with simulation is propagated to inference mechanism and this allows the system to recognize the state of the machine assembled.

This work reconstructs 3D graphics model of an object from an image sequence taken during the object rotation. Shading and its motion information are used in estimating shapes of smooth surfaces between fixed edges from corners and patterns. Being different from conventional shape from shadings that use one or several images, we use an image sequence that provides not only shading but also its motion. Maximum diffused shading moving on surfaces is followed at each rotation plane and surface normals are obtained. Positions of points are estimated from moving shading using motion stereo principle. It is linear equations directly achieving the results rather than iterative computation in shape from shading using complex approximation.