Animal-Robot Interaction for pet caring

Pet has been serving as an emotional companion to people. However, nowadays it is common that people are too busy to take care of their pet due to everyday work. This research is to see the possibility that robot can replace the role of taking care of pets on behalf of their owner and the conventional human-robot interaction (HRI) can be extended to the interaction of robots and animals. In this paper, the concept of animal-robot interaction (ARI) and its characteristics are presented along with basic experiments. The experiments are carried out with a cat and mobile robots. It clearly shows the possibility of implementation of ARI.