Mobile care robot accepting requests through nonverbal interaction

This paper presents our on-going work in developing service robots that provide assisted-care to the elderly in multi-party settings. In typical Japanese day-care facilities, multiple caregivers and visitors are co-present in the same room and any caregiver may provide assistance to any visitor. In order to effectively work in such settings, a robot should behave in a way that a person who needs assistance can easily initiate help from the robot. Based on findings from observations at several day-care facilities, we have developed a mobile robot system that displays availability to multiple persons and then displays recipiency to an individual who initiates interaction with the robot. In this paper we detail this robot system and its experimental result.