Examination on a Software Simulation of the Method and Effect of Preliminary-announcement and Display of Human-friendly Robot's Following Action

This paper examines the preliminary-announcement and display function of human-friendly robot's following action and intention, especially about the direction of motion and the speed of motion for mobile robot which moves on a 2-dimentional plane. We proposed 2 types of methods: the method indicating a state just after the moment (lamp and party-blowouts) and the method displaying from the present to some future time continouously (beam-of-light and projector). Simulation system has been developed to confirm the effectiveness of the preliminary-announcement and display. Effctiveness can be evaluated by the mobile robot chasing. The mobile robot moves about at a random speed in a random direction. Subject person moves the operation robot by using joystick with looking at the preliminary-announcement on the mobile robot. So the method to display (lamp/blowout/beam) and the timing to announce (0.5-3.0 [s] before the actual motion of the robot) are evaluated numerically with the position/direction gap. The data is processed not only as the average and the standard deviation but also with the two-way ANOVA and t-screening. It was examined on a translation and a rotation separately and then on a 2-dimentional plane. We have found that the method displaying from the present to some future time continuously (beam) is easy to understand. But some amount of length of the displayed path in necessary, which means an appropriate timing depending on conditions. The optimal timing for indicating a state is almost 1.0-1.5 [s] before. If the time difference is too much long, the position/direction gap become large due to the poor memory and the operational mistake. If that is too short the operation will be late owing to the reaction delay. Moreover it seems that human being tends to understand some information with a transforming object than with a changing-color object, and continuous changing is easier to understand than distributed changing.