Human-friendly Communication for Robot Partners using Social Networking Service

The quality of community (QOC) and the quality of life (QOL) have been a primarily concern in this past years. One of the tools used to increase QOC and QOL is Social Networking Service (SNS). This paper discusses emotional expression of a robot partner based on SNS. The robot partner is composed of a smart device used as a face module and the robot body module with two arms. First we discuss the necessity of SNS utilized by the robot partner. Next, we propose an emotional model used for determining the face expression and arm gesture of the robot partner. We conduct some experiments to discuss the effectiveness of the proposed method based on facial and gestural expression using emotional parameters extracted from sentences uploaded in Twitter. Finally, we show the robot partner can perform face expression and arm gesture based on emotional model using SNS as the experiment result.