Robot middleware architecture mediating familiarity-oriented and environment-oriented behaviors

This paper presents a middleware architecture for personal robots applied to various environments. The architecture allows a robot to consistently integrate environment-oriented applications with its original and familiar characteristics for its user. The familiar characteristics and environment-oriented applications tend to be developed independently. However, the two kinds of functions should share sensors and actuators to generate consistent actions. To this end, we have analyzed the relationship between robot actions and their mental effects on the user, and have designed middleware, called the “mediator,” to play the role of mediator by dynamically selecting either: 1) sequential execution, 2) time-sharing execution, or 3) concurrent execution. We had an experiment to simulate the mediation, and to estimate the familiarity and efficiency.