HATSUKI : An anime character like robot figure platform with anime-style expressions and imitation learning based action generation

Japanese character figurines are popular and have a pivot position in Otaku culture. Although numerous robots have been developed, few have focused on otaku-culture or on embodying anime character figurines. Therefore, we take the first steps to bridge this gap by developing Hatsuki, which is a humanoid robot platform with anime based design. Hatsuki’s novelty lies in its aesthetic design, 2D facial expressions, and anime-style behaviors that allows Hatsuki to deliver rich interaction experiences resembling anime-characters. We explain our design implementation process of Hatsuki, followed by our evaluations. In order to explore user impressions and opinions towards Hatsuki, we conducted a questionnaire in the world’s largest anime-figurine event. The results indicate that participants were generally very satisfied with Hatsuki’s design, and proposed various use case scenarios and deployment contexts for Hatsuki. The second evaluation focused on imitation learning, as such a method can provide better interaction ability in the real world and generate rich, context-adaptive behaviors in different situations. We made Hatsuki learn 11 actions, combining voice, facial expressions and motions, through the neural network based policy model with our proposed interface. Results show our approach was successfully able to generate the actions through self-organized contexts, which shows the potential for generalizing our approach in further actions under different contexts. Lastly, we present our future research direction for Hatsuki and provide our conclusion.