Friendly social robot that understands human´s friendly relationships

This paper reports our novel approach to developing a social robot. The developed robot is able to identify relationships among humans from their physical behaviors as it establishes long-term relationships with humans. This interactive humanoid robot attracts humans to interact with it and, as a result, induces them to perform their group behaviors in front of it. The robot recognizes friendly relationships among humans by simultaneously identifying each person in the interacting group. We conducted a two-month experiment in an elementary school. As a result, the robot successfully continued friendly interaction with many children for the two months, and demonstrated reasonable performance in identifying friendships among children. We believe this ability to maintain friendly relationships with humans and to identify human relationships is essential to behaving socially.