2004 Asia Broadband Symposium on Digital City Collaboration

Robots as New Media for Supporting Interaction and Collaboration in

Digital City

Hiroshi Ishiguro

Professor, Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, Osaka University,

Japan

Many robotics researchers are exploring new possibilities of intelligent robots in our everyday life. Humanoid robots, which have various modalities, can communicate with humans as new information media. In this talk, we argue how to develop the interactive humanoid robots and how to evaluate them as introducing several robots developed in ATR and Osaka University. Especially, we focus on a constructive approach to developing the interactive robots, cognitive studies using the humanoid robots and android robots for evaluating the interactions, and long-term field experiments in an elementary school. I hope that attendees catch a new wave in robotics research and our feature life.

He is a professor of Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, Osaka University, Japan and a group leader of 2nd laboratory of ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communications (www.irc.atr.jp). He received D.Eng. degree from Osaka University, Japan, in 1991. In 1991, he started working as a research assistant of Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Yamanashi University, Japan. Then he moved to Department of Systems Engineering, Osaka University, Japan, as a research assistant in 1992. From 1991 to 1994, He developed several vision-guided mobile robots and studied on active and omnidirectonal vision. In 1994, He was an associate professor of Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Japan, and started research of distributed vision using omnidirectional cameras. From 1998 to 1999, He worked in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego, USA, as a visiting scholar. From 1999, he was a visiting researcher in ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Laboratories and he stared a project of interactive humanoid robots. He also established a venture company Vstone Co. Ltd. (www.vstone.co.jp). In 2000, he moved to Department of Computer and Communication Sciences, Wakayama University, Japan, as an associate professor and became a professor in 2001. Then he moved to Osaka University as a professor in 2002. He started working on social robots, android robots, and perceptual information infrastructure. Contact him at ishiguro@ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp. His homepages is http://www.ed.ams.eng. Osaka-u.ac.jp.