Dynamic communication of humanoid robot with multiple people based on interaction distance

Research on human-robot interaction is getting an increasing amount of attention. Since almost all the research has dealt with only communication between one robot and one person, there have been quite few discussions about communication between a robot and multiple people. This paper proposes a method which enables robots to communicate with multiple people using the 'selection priority of the interactive partner' based on the concept of 'Proxemics'. In this method, a robot changes active sensory-motor modalities based on the 'interaction distance' information. The proposed method is implemented into a humanoid robot SIG2 using subsumption architecture. SIG2 has various sensory-motor modalities to interact with humans. A demonstration of SIG2 showed that the proposed method works well during interaction with multiple people.