Easy development of communicative behaviors in social robots

This paper presents a development framework for social robots with which developers can easily prepare communicative behaviors based on tag-based sentences. Previous literature in human-robot interaction has revealed various useful non-verbal behaviors. But for developers, integrating such a large amount of non-verbal behaviors each time they build a social robot is not realistic. The more repertory of non-verbal behaviors acquire, the larger is the burden faced by developers to implement the non-verbal behaviors. Our software, however, only requires developers to prepare sentences with simple markup language for controlling explicit non-verbal behaviors and utterances. The backend system analyzes the tag input and adds implicit non-verbal behaviors accordingly. With the help of previous literature, the system is equipped with various communicative behaviors, so that the robot autonomously adjusts its gazes, gestures, and standing points. The system's effectiveness is demonstrated with examples on robot interaction where the system receives only simple sentences with scripting language to produce complex and communicative robot behaviors.