Abstract :
Personal robots are designed to provide entertainment, companion and communication interfaces. They can play an important role as natural, flexible and non-invasive interfaces to access the Web. The use of personal robots as Web interfaces is in concordance with the tendency of integrating Web technologies in the normal human activities. In general terms, we propose that personal robots can implement the everyday computing paradigm, which basically scales ubiquitous computing with respect to time. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to propose the use of personal robots as ubiquitous, multimedial, mobile, self-personalized, natural and empathic Web and Internet interfaces. We introduce Bender, a personal robot whose design incorporates these ideas.
Keywords :
Internet; control engineering computing; mobile computing; mobile robots; multimedia computing; user interfaces; Bender; Internet interface; Web access; empathic Web; natural Web; personal robot; self-personalized Web; ubiquitous computing; ubiquitous-multimedial-mobile Web interface; Human robot interaction; Keyboards; Mobile robots; Mood; Pervasive computing; Robotics and automation; Senior citizens; Service robots; Ubiquitous computing; Web and internet services;