Hearing-Dog Robot to Wake People Up Using its Bumping Action

摘要

We propose a robot inspired by the behavior of hearing dogs. Hearing dog is a guide dog for deaf people by notifying them of some life sounds such as fire alarms, doorbells, wake-up calls and so on. Hearing dogs use their touching behavior to communicate deaf people. This is a kind of haptic communications. The proposed robot also uses physical contact to communicate the people like hearing dog's touching behavior. The robot can approach and bump the people to notify of some life sounds happened around the people. This paper utilized the robot as wake-up call. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the usefulness of the robot to wake up sleeping people. This paper reports the experimental results and discusses usefulness of the robot's wake-up call.