Human-Object-Robot Interaction Through Playing Behaviour for Social Robots

Inspired by a common behaviour pattern from the dog-human relationship, we present a behaviour model combined with a method for controlling a real mobile robot, effectively realizing physical Human-Object-Robot Interaction. Translating social behaviours from the dog-human relationship into social robots has been already found to be a viable way. Playing, a cardinal behaviour element in the dog-human relationship, turned out to be one of the highest priority factors in forming a successful and lasting relationship between dogs and humans. Accordingly, we modeled the playing behavior when a human repeatedly initiates playing with a dog by picking up and throwing an object (toy), expecting the dog to go for the object and bring it back to the person throwing it, commonly known as playing fetch. We also developed a robot control system able to execute the commands from the behaviour model, and for gathering the poses of the participants in the real physical space we have used the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get Indoor Localization (WIL) system. The integration of these components allowed us to create a social robotics system able to offer real physical human-object-robot interaction fast enough to be enjoyable for human participants, as a tool to be used in future HRI experiments, which was our main goal. The proposed behaviour model is intended to be embedded into social robots with the purpose of applying it in e.g. therapy, child-rearing, child-robot interaction scenarios, human behaviour assessment, recreational or entertainment scenarios.