SCHEMA: Multi-Party Interaction-Oriented Humanoid Robot

Most of our daily communication occurs in groups, at school, home, and work place, so this project proposes a robot that can participate in routine human conversations. 

Traditional human-robot interaction studies have focused on one-to-one interaction.  SCHEMA is a robot that participates in and activates group communication.  The system design is based on psychological theories of multi-party communication. When a master of ceremonies in a quiz game selects a question with a mobile device, the question is projected on a screen. Panelists (SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 attendees) answer the question as SCHEMA recognizes the context of the game using speech recognition and image processing of participants faces, visual gaze, and other nonverbal cues. Then the robot selects its behaviors and targets (panelists) at appropriate times and with appropriate utterances to maximize its participation in the game.

Yoichi Matsuyama
Kosuke Hosoya 
Hikaru Taniyama 
Hiroki Tsuboi 
Shinya Fujie 
Tetsunori Kobayashi
 Waseda University