Abstract
Most of the recently developed robots are human friendly robots which imitate an animal or human such as entertainment robot, biomimetic robot and humanoid robot. Interest in these robots is increased because the social trend is focused on health, welfare, and graying. By these social backgrounds, robots become more human friendly and suitable or home or personal environment. The more biomimetic robots resemble living creature, the more human feels familiarity. Human feels close friendship not only when feeding a pet, but also when watching a pet having the food. Most of entertainment robots and pet robots use internal-type batteries and have a self-recharging function. Entertainment robots and pet robots with internal-type batteries are not able to operate during charging the battery. So far there have been a few robots that do not depend on an internal battery. However, they need a bulky energy conversion unit and a slug or foods as an energy source, which is not suitable for home or personal application. In this paper, we introduce a new biomimetic entertainment robot with autonomous eating functionality, called EPRO-1(Eating Pet RObot version 1). The EPRO-1 is able to eat a food (a small battery), by itself and evacuate. We describe the design concept of the autonomous eating mechanism of the EPRO-1, characteristics of sub-parts of the manufactured mechanism and its control system.