SDR-4X II: A Small Humanoid as an Entertainer in Home Environment

In this paper we describe the autonomous behavior control architecture of SDR-4X II, which serves to integrate multi-modal recognition and motion control technologies. We overview the entire software architecture of SDR-4X II, which is composed of perception, short and long term memory, behavior control, and motion control parts. Regarding autonomous behavior control, we further focus on issues such as spontaneous behavior generation using a homeostasis regulation mechanism, and a behavior control/selection mechanism with tree-structured situated behavior modules. In the autonomous behavior control architecture, we achieve three basic requirements, which are the concurrent evaluation of the situation of each behavior module, concurrent execution of multiple behavior modules, and preemption (behavior interruption/resume capability). Using the autonomous behavior control architecture described, we demonstrate that SDR-4X II can spontaneously and passively interact with a human.

[1]  Hiroaki Kitano,et al.  Development of an Autonomous Quadruped Robot for Robot Entertainment , 1998, Auton. Robots.

[2]  M. Fujita,et al.  Physically and Emotionally Grounded Symbol Acquisition for Autonomous Robots , 2001 .

[3]  Kohtaro Sabe,et al.  Environment identification by comparing maps of landmarks , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[4]  Masahiro Fujita,et al.  Ethological modeling and architecture for an entertainment robot , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[5]  M. Fujita,et al.  An autonomous robot that eats information via interaction with humans and environments , 2001, Proceedings 10th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. ROMAN 2001 (Cat. No.01TH8591).

[6]  Masahiro Fujita,et al.  An open architecture for robot entertainment , 1997, AGENTS '97.