A rectangle-based relative localization method is proposed for a mobile robot based on a novel geometric formulation. In an artificial environment where a mobile robot navigates, rectangular shapes are ubiquitous. When a scene rectangle is captured using a camera attached to a mobile robot, localization can be performed and described in the relative coordinates of the scene rectangle. Especially, our method works with a single image for a scene rectangle whose aspect ratio is not known. Moreover, a camera calibration is unnecessary with an assumption of the pinhole camera model. The proposed method is largely based on the theory of coupled line cameras (CLC), which provides a basis for efficient computation with analytic solutions and intuitive geometric interpretation. We introduce the fundamentals of CLC and describe the proposed method with some experimental results in simulation environment.

This paper presents the concept for the development of a pet-type robot with an emotion engine. The pet-type robot named KOBIE (KOala roBot with Intelligent Emotion) is able to interact with a person through touch. KOBIE is equipped with tactile sensors on the body for interaction with a person through recognition of his/her touching behaviors such as “Stroke”,“Tickle”,“Hit”. We have covered KOBIE with synthetic fur fabric in order to can make him/her feel affection as well. KOBIE is able to also express an emotional status that varies according to the circumstances under which it is presented. The emotion engine of KOBIE's emotion expression system generates an emotional status in an emotion vector space which is associated with a predefined needs and mood models. In order to examine the feasibility of our emotion expression system, we verified a changing emotional status in our emotion vector space by a touching behavior. We specially examined the reaction of children who have interacted with three kind of pet-type robots: KOBIE, PARO, AIBO for roughly 10 minutes to investigate the children's preference for pet-type robots.