Create socially interactive robots and AI that are easy for people to engage with.

Keywords: Robot, AI, Communication

Even in the remarkable recent developments of robots and AI in society, there are many situations where people feel that robots and AI are difficult to handle and decide to postpone their introduction. In particular, high-performance AI represented by ChatGPT not only generates text but also demonstrates advanced functions such as the automatic recognition of objects in images; however, there are often doubts about the safety and reliability of its outputs. I aim to realize a function that clearly communicates to users, who are humans, what robots and AI can and cannot do at an intuitive level, striving for the creation of "truly user-friendly" robots and AI. I am conducting research to develop socially viable robots and AI at the level of social implementation using the power of engineering, while also investigating the impact on users by utilizing insights from sociology. Additionally, since contextual information about users and their surrounding environment, such as user intentions, emotions, and areas with high foot traffic, is also necessary, I am simultaneously conducting research to estimate the less visible states of people and environments from data collected by various sensors, including camera footage, LiDAR, and temperature sensors.

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