Efficient User-Searching of A Hearing-Dog Robot in Consideration of user's Life Rhythm

A hearing dog is a sort of assistance dog for hearing impaired people. Physical touch of the dog can alert the people to important life sounds, such as doorbells, alarm clocks, or fire alarms. Hearing dogs can work to assist the people, but the working number of hearing dogs are insufficient all over the world. Instead of hearing dogs, a hearing-dog robot has been developed. The robot can autonomously move to search for a user to notify the life sounds. This paper proposed new searching algorithm of the robot. The searching algorithm utilizes past information about where the user was found so far. In order to achieve efficient searching, the searching algorithm hired user's life rhythm. The experiment was conducted to evaluate the efficiency between the algorithm with and without the user's life rhythm. As the result, it was confirmed that the algorithm with the user's life rhythm could find the user in shorter time than the one without the user's life rhythm.