Development of a Play-Tag Robot with Human–Robot Contact

Abstract

Many robots that play with humans have been developed so far, but developing a robot that physically contacts humans while playing is challenging. We have developed robots that play tag with humans, which find players, approach them, and move away from them. However, the developed algorithm for approaching a player was insufficient because it did not consider how the arms are attached to the robot. Therefore, in this paper, we assume that the arms are fixed on both sides of the robot and develop a new algorithm to approach the player and touch them with an arm. Since the algorithm aims to move along a circular orbit around a player, we call this algorithm “the go-round mode”. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted two experiments. The first is a simulation experiment, which showed that the proposed method outperformed the previous one. In the second experiment, we implemented the proposed method in a real robot and conducted an experiment to chase and touch the player. As a result, the robot could touch the player in all the trials without collision.