Dynamic Communication of Humanoid Robot with Multiple People Based on Interaction Distance

Research on human-robot interaction is getting an increasing amount of attention. Since most research has dealt with communication between one robot and one person, quite few researchers have studied communication between a robot and multiple people. This paper presents a method that enables robots to communicate with multiple people using the ``selection priority of the interactive partner'' based on the concept of Proxemics. In this method, a robot changes active sensory-motor modalities based on the interaction distance between itself and a person. Our method was implemented into a humanoid robot, SIG2. SIG2 has various sensory-motor modalities to interact with humans. A demonstration of SIG2 showed that our method selected an appropriate interaction partner during interaction with multiple people.