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Keynote Speaker

Takayuki Kanda

Kyoto University, Japan
Keynote Speaker Bio

Takayuki Kanda is a professor in Informatics at Kyoto University, Japan. He is also a Visiting Group Leader at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. He received his B. Eng, M. Eng, and Ph. D. degrees in computer science from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. He is one of the starting members of Communication Robots project at ATR. He has developed a communication robot, Robovie, and applied it in daily situations, such as peer-tutor at elementary school and a museum exhibit guide. His research interests include human-robot interaction, interactive humanoid robots, and field trials.

Social Robots in Public Space
Social robots are coming to appear in our daily lives. Yet, it is not as easy as one might imagine. We developed a human-like social robot, Robovie, and studied the way to make it serve for people in public space, such as a shopping mall. On the technical side, we developed a human-tracking sensor network, which enables us to robustly identify locations of pedestrians. Given that the robot was able to understand pedestrian behaviors, we studied various human-robot interaction. We faced many of difficulties along the way. For instance, the robot failed to initiate interaction with a person, and failed to coordinate with environments, like causing a congestion around it. Toward solving these problems, we have developed various human interaction models. Such models enabled the robot to better serve individuals, and also helped us to understand people’s crowd behavior, such as congestion around the robot. I plan to talk about a couple of studies along this line, and some of the successful services provided by the social robot in the shopping mall, hoping to provide an insight about how social robots in public space will look like in the near future.

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