Museum Guide Robot with Communicative Head Motion

Face or head movement plays an important role in human communication. This paper presents a museum guide robot that moves its head to communicate smoothly with humans. We have analyzed the behavior of human guides when they explain exhibits to visitors. Then, we have developed a robot system that can recognize the human´s face movement using vision. The robot turns its head depending on the human´s face direction and the contents of utterances. We use the analysis results of human behavior to control the head movements. Experimental results show that it is effective for the guide robot to turn its head while explaining exhibits