Realization of a robot system that plays "darumasan-ga-koronda" game with humans

In this paper, we describe the development of a robot that plays the "darumasan-gakoronda" game with human players. It is a big challenge to develop a robot that can play with human players. We first observed the human-human game play and listed the problems for a robot to play the game with human players. We pointed out the following six tasks: detect players, track the detected players, decide if players are freezing (the "out" judgment), move to the nearest player, touch the player, and move back to the original position. Then, we designed a robot that uses a laser range finder (LRF) to measure the players and a robot avatar to interact with the players. Then, we developed the components needed to play the game. In this paper, we describe the details of the development of the arm to touch the player, the "out" judgment, and a function to return to the origin after finishing the game. Then, we describe an experimental result of the evaluation of the total system, as well as the track record of the demonstrations in the events.