Mascot Robot System Based on Fuzzy Control Technology

A mascot robot system based on fuzzy inference is developed for casual information recommendation in a home environment. The system is an Internet-based intelligent robotic environment that assists human by information retrieval and presenting recommendation with casual communication. It consists of five eye robots that present friendly mentality expression, speech recognition modules, an information recommendation engine that recommends information to human by taking into account the current situation, and a server that supervises the whole system. In addition, a fuzzy logic based multi-modal gesture recognition system is added based on, where both web camera images and hand motion data (given by a 3D acceleration sensor put on human wrists) are used to notify the emotion of humans to robots in real time. These components are networked and integrated hierarchically based on RT (Robot Technology) middleware. The subjective estimation using psychological scale has been conducted for 11 subjects. Since the results of the subjective estimation shows 3.08 and 2.62, the validity of the fuzzy interpersonal motions expression has been confirmed. The proposed mascot robot system provides informative support to human through casual communication in a home environment.