Human-centric point of view for a robot partner: A cooperative project between France and Japan

Robot partners are very useful to help elderly and disabled people keep mental health. This paper explains how a robot partner with a human-centric point of view has been designed and built through a cooperation between the Graduate School of System Design of the Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan, and the LISTIC of Polytech Annecy Chambery, France. First, we describe the physical design of the robot partner. Next, we present the software part of the robot partner, divided into the offline speech recognition and the knowledge base. Then we show experimental results of the speech recognition. Finally, we discuss the future direction of this project.