Novel siamese robot platform for multi-human robot interaction

Abstract

Service robots have been designed to support people in public places, i.e. schools, museums, shopping malls, etc. However, the existing one-headed robots have a limitation that they cannot interact with a person behind them while interacting with another person in front of them. To overcome the limitation, we propose a novel Siamese robot platform motivated by “Siamese twins” in nature. The proposed Siamese robot consists of two heads, two arms, and a body to cover all directions. Two separate individuals share the arms and the body, and therefore we also propose three coordination schemes to mediate the individuals. Experiments were carried out with a physical Siamese robot, “Siambot” in a real environment, and the results show that the proposed Siamese robot is efficient and effective in multi-human robot interaction. A video showing the strengths of the Siamese robot can be found at https://youtu.be/99P4O35v4Ck.