Computational Intelligence and its Application to Humans-Robots Interaction

Speaker: Professor Kaoru Hirota, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Abstract: Many interesting robots, e.g., HONDA ASIMO and TOYOTA trumpet playing robot, have been developed and accepted by general public. In most cases, however, the operations/demonstrations are done by one robot and one human operator. It is expected that in the near future we'll be able to realize a society with many robots/machines and many humans communicating with each other by internet-mediated or face to face communication. The presenter’s group at Tokyo Institute of Technology has been studying "many robots and many humans" communicating through internet, where the general environment (referred to as atmosphere) of the communication plays an important role for the smooth interaction. The concept of Fuzzy Atmosfield (FA) is proposed to describe the atmosphere in such humans-robots communication. This is expressed as a point in a 3D fuzzy cubic space, and is varying/moving in the space time by time. To understand easily such movement of the atmosphere, a graphical representation method is also proposed. To illustrate the FA and its visualization method, demonstration scenarios by five eye robots and four humans are demonstrated.

Professor Kaoru Hirota, is one of the leading contributors to Pattern recognition, Intelligent robotics, Fuzzy Control and Artificial Intelligence. He served as President of the Japanese Society for Soft Computing for many years. His research laboratory at TITech continues to attract some of the leading contributors to this research field as Visiting Scholars and has created a natural bridge between academic research centres and the Japanese industry exploiting results of Soft Computing research. Professor Hirota published over 260 papers in journals, over 500 papers in international conferences and over 50 books. His work has attracted over 5000 citations indexed by the ISI-WoS with h-index of 34. He is Honorary Professor at five universities outside Japan including current appointment at the University of Nottingham.