**3. Humanoid robot testing**

TRI – the Toyota Research Institute was founded in 2016. Their role is to perform research, identify and create new capabilities Toyota intends to have in the future [11]. Toyota is trying to approach the future from a human-centred perspective with the goal of facilitating and bringing significant amount of fulfilment and happiness preferable to a majority of people of all walks of life on a basic i.e. fundamental level. This pursuit is based on a powerful idea that is contained even in some prominent constitutions that each person's life should strive towards

#### *Communication and Interaction between Humanoid Robots and Humans DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.97334*

happiness, meaning and purpose. In Japan, this is called Ikigai. Studies of Ikigai teach people that they feel most fulfilment when their lives incorporate work that they love and help society to enable more people to achieve their Ikigai. They pursue new forms of automation in society with a human touch to develop capabilities that amplify, rather than replace human ability. This is Toyota's historic philosophy of Jidoka, an idea that embraces the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in other words, the human, and the machine work together in order to do something better than if either one of them could do on their own.

They are currently pursuing this vision in four research areas: Robotics, Automated Driving, Accelerated Materials Design and Discovery, and Machine Assisted Cognition [11].

TRI vision and mission are focused on solving the problem of how technologies can enhance and ease the human experience bringing forth a higher quality of life, independence and happiness. TRI envisions a future where Toyota products can improve the quality of life for societies around the world with an outstanding performance and contribution, their mission being the development of automated driving, robotics and other human enhancement and amplification technology from Toyota. Technological capabilities that will help people navigate safely from their kitchen to their living rooms, or safely across town, and most importantly, by providing this kind of human amplification technology, they hope to make the quality of life for everyone much better [11].

A growing number of Japanese businesses are testing robots as a viable solution to the country's shrinking workforce. They're popping up in stores, banks and soon are expected also in hotels. Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ is testing Nao, a robotic client service that answers basic questions and is designed to speak 19 languages. Multilingual polyglot robotics has been planned to serve foreign clients during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

By the time, the bank hopes to have even more robots on its staff. Pepper is a humanoid robot talking to clients. A humanoid has human-like features, for example, arms, legs as well as a head - but it is designed to look like a robot. Producer Softbank hopes Pepper will be a family robot, as in the Jetsons cartoons.

A hotel planned to open at Huis Ten Bosch Amusement Park in Nagasaki this summer aims to have 10 robots as staff members and soon to increase the number to more than 90 percent of hotel services being provided by robots as shown in **Figure 6**.

Today's innovation may be the necessity of tomorrow. Japan has an aging population that has fuelled heated debates about the involvement of robots in the state's workforce. A survey by home service operator Orix Living found that more seniors feel comfortable being nursed by a robot than when receiving services from a foreign nurse. The number of elderly citizens in Japan is steadily increasing, thus bringing about a real need for humanoid service robots to help them out in dealing and taking care of various home tasks.

In a country where the population is shrinking due to various reasons, where the workforce is shrinking and there is considerable resistance to an influx of immigrants as in Japan, it appears that robots may play a very big role in their future [13].

#### **3.1 Pepper robot understands the emotions**

One group that seems to want to embrace robots are elderly citizens of Japan who are cared for by robots. Using emotion recognition functions, the Pepper robot, released in February 2015, can understand and respond to people who joke, dance, and even make rep music in the Japanese language, see **Figure 7**. Pepper robot is

**3. Humanoid robot testing**

*Sophia Intelligent Robot [10].*

**Figure 4.** *Nao robot [9].*

*Collaborative and Humanoid Robots*

**Figure 5.**

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TRI – the Toyota Research Institute was founded in 2016. Their role is to perform research, identify and create new capabilities Toyota intends to have in the future [11]. Toyota is trying to approach the future from a human-centred perspective with the goal of facilitating and bringing significant amount of fulfilment and happiness preferable to a majority of people of all walks of life on a basic i.e. fundamental level. This pursuit is based on a powerful idea that is contained even in

some prominent constitutions that each person's life should strive towards

**Figure 6.** *Robot chief in preparing the pancakes [12].*

Microsoft Kinect sensor is comprised of three sensors: an infrared projector, an infrared camera and RGB camera to capture high resolution 3D images. The Kinect sensor is a popular sensor for robotics due to the advanced capabilities it offers for the human-robot interaction. Microsoft Kinect sensor is a major innovation in

*Communication and Interaction between Humanoid Robots and Humans*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.97334*

With the use of dedicated software, users can easily control the movements of a robot by using an Xbox Kinect and their bodies to dictate and instruct the desired

A Microsoft Kinect v2 camera is used to track human motion using skeleton tracking. This technique has some limitations on tracking particular motions, especially motions of the palm of the hand that cannot yet be recognized. For example, the motion primitive "close hand" can be commanded while remotely operating the arm to hover over the grasping position. An online tracking system has been developed to control the arm of a Bioloid robot using Kinect sensor. The task of this work was hand-guiding robot arms using Microsoft Kinect v2. This objective has been achieved using a Kinect v2 and a Bioloid robot, which is a humanoid robot with 18 degrees of freedom (DOF) in total. The joint motions of the operator's arms and legs in the real world captured by a Kinect camera can be transferred into the workspace mathematically via forward and inverse kinematics, realistically through data-based UDP connection between the robot and Kinect sensor. The user assumes a specific pose to initiate a skeletal tracking. After the tracking begins, the user can start controlling the robot. After turning the motors on, the user can operate the robot remotely. The initial location of the user becomes the origin of the control

This system consists of both hardware and software. The way it functions is by

capturing the user gestures, processing them and sending the processed signal further to the humanoid robot. Initially, the user makes a certain body gesture

The Kinect sensor is then used to capture the depth image of the user and recognizes the gesture by tracking the user's skeleton. This stage is called the image capturing stage. The depth image captured is processed into a computer in order to obtain an approximation of the positions of each body joint. In the gesture recognition stage, the angle between some of the body joints are then calculated and used as

robotics.

**Figure 8.** *Kinect sensor [15].*

modalities.

**4.2 Software description**

coordinate system.

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**5. Connecting the Bioloid robot with Kinect**

maintaining it for a short period of time [16].

**Figure 7.** *Pepper robot at the working place [14].*

1.20 meters tall, has been designed by Softbank Robotics and can handle a conversation with people.

It can analyse human expressions, voice tones and gestures, thereby enabling them to respond. This type of robot can serve for education, health and entertainment purposes, its primary purpose however being not hard work, but home entertainment or shopping.

Pepper is the ideal robot for a family and can very quickly become the family of those individuals living alone and feeling lonely in their households, as it makes the elderly feel very comfortable in their interactions with these types of humanoid robots. In this context it should be mentioned that the Japanese society is prone to a friendly approach in its relations to robots in general and humanoid robots in particular. This is related also to their history and especially their world famous manga books.
