Title: Building neural network-based behaviour systems for emotion-based pet robots

Authors: Wei-Po Lee, Tsung-Hsien Yang, Bingchiang Jeng

Addresses: Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, No.70 Lienhai Road, Kaohsiung 80424, Taiwan. ' Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, No.70 Lienhai Road, Kaohsiung 80424, Taiwan. ' Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, No.70 Lienhai Road, Kaohsiung 80424, Taiwan

Abstract: Designing robots for home entertainment has become an important application of intelligent autonomous robot. Yet, robot design takes considerable amount of time, and the short life cycle of toy-type robots with fixed prototypes and repetitive behaviours is in fact disadvantageous. Therefore, it is important to develop a framework of robot configuration so that the user can always change the characteristics of his pet robot easily. In this paper, we present a user-centred interactive framework that employs a neural network-based approach to construct behaviour primitives and behaviour arbitrators for robots. For evaluation, we use the proposed framework to construct emotion-based pet robots. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Keywords: pet robots; artificial emotion; neural networks; behaviour learning; behaviour arbitration; user-centred design; home entertainment; intelligent robots; autonomous robots; robot design; toy type robots; robot configurations.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIC.2010.035286

International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, 2010 Vol.11 No.1/2, pp.115 - 123

Published online: 20 Sep 2010 *

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