Development of Laughter Motion on the Cognitive Robot "Bono-02" Assisting Group Conversation

In recent years, Japan is facing the problem of super-aged society. One problem of super aged society is that the number of patients with dementia is increasing. People who don't have much social interaction have higher risk to occur dementia. We have developed a robot, which can turn take and prompt speech of participants via supportive responses in order to activate group conversation among older people. However, motion for turn taking or prompting speech have not been investigated. Purpose of this study is to investigate appropriate laughter motions of the robot by applying several laughter motions of active human speakers. Experiments were carried out among 14 young people. Then we evaluated the laughter motions of the robot as average smile degree of the participants objective evaluation and as points of questionnaires' answers subjective evaluation. The experimental results showed that the sounds "fu-fu-fu" and "ha-ha-ha" of laughter of the robot were suitable with the motion of moving one's hand in front of mouth, and the sound "wa-ha-ha-ha" went well with motions of bending the upper part of the body and extending both hands.