Robotic Office Room to support office work by human behavior understanding function with networked machines

This paper proposes a novel human-robot symbiosis system named a Robotic Office Room (ROR). The understanding, recording and retrieving of telephone call behavior are successfully demonstrated as a typical example of an office work-supporting function of ROR. A unique object model is proposed, which accumulates information concerning motion of the object. This model enables the system to understand human behavior, not by monitoring the motion of the human, but by monitoring the motion of the object-typically, a telephone or pen. Since the model requires the system to pay spatial and temporal attention only to the target object and related motions, it saves computing power. Repertoires of understandable behavior can easily be expanded by simply adding new object models. The ROR is equipped with networked machines. The concept of "ubiquitous link" consisting of unique image channels and remote control channels is proposed. The image channel and the remote control channel utilize TV images and either ultrasonic waves or infrared rays, respectively. Such cooperative support of humans by networked machines is realized that when a human starts to talk on the phone, the ROR not only starts to record the image of the human's behavior, utilizing a VCR, but also turns down the volume on an audio set. The experiment proved the feasibility of the ROR as an integrated robotic system to support human office work.