• Journal of the HCI Society of Korea
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.5-10
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• 2018

This paper provokes considerations on companionship. As human-robot relation becomes important, the role and communication styles of robot become crucial. In order to see how we should design communication styles of social robots, we generated scenarios based on pre-studies. Then, we conducted a $2{\times}2$ experiment to compare four different conditions by expected role and communication style. We divided expected roles into playing and serving role by dominance level. Also, we matched communication style on one condition and mismatched on the other. The results imply matching role with communication style is crucial in some role, however not in every role. As HCI expands to human-computer relation, our study would inspire future research on companionship between human and robots.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.1293-1301
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• 2017

Recent changes in social structure, such as nuclear family and personalization, are leading to personal and social problems, which may cause various problems due to negative emotional amplification. The absence of a family member who gives a sense of psychological stability in the past can be considered as a representative cause of the emotional difficulties of modern people. This personal and social problem is solved through the empathic interaction of the companion robot communication with users in daily life. In this study, we developed sophisticated empathic interaction design through prototyping of emotional robots. As a result, it was confirmed that the face interaction greatly affects the emotional interaction of the emotional robot and the interaction of the robot improves the emotional sense of the robot. This study has the theoretical and practical significance in that the emotional robot is made more sophisticated interaction and the guideline of the sympathetic interaction design is presented based on the experimental results.

• Information and Communications Magazine
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• v.21 no.10
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• pp.36-43
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• 2004

URC(Ubiquitous Robotic Companion)는 기존로봇에 네트워크 및 정보 기술을 접목한 지능형 서비스 로봇의 새로운 개념으로서, 언제, 어디서나 나와 함께하며, 나에게 필요한 서비스를 제공하는 네트워크 기반 로봇이다. URC 개념이 구현되기 위해서는 유비퀴터스 네트워크 또는 센서 네트워크, 고성능 로봇용 서버 등과 같은 하드웨어 인프라가 구축되어 있어야 하며, 이러한 인프라 상에서 구동되는 소프트웨어 인프라가 필요하다. 소프트웨어 로봇은 이러한 소프트웨어 인프라에 해당하며, '유비퀴터스 네트워크 환경에서 언제 어디서나 상황에 맞는 정보와 서비스를 능동적으로 제공하는 새로운 개념의 지능형 소프트 웨어'이다. 본 고에서는 이러한 소프트웨어 로봇의 개념과 이 개념을 지원하기 위한 시스템에 대해 논의 한다.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.158-162
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• 2006

This paper presents a speaker recognition system intended for use in human-robot interaction. The proposed speaker recognition system can achieve significantly high performance in the Ubiquitous Robot Companion (URC) environment. The URC concept is a scenario in which a robot is connected to a server through a broadband connection allowing functions to be performed on the server side, thereby minimizing the stand-alone function significantly and reducing the robot client cost. Instead of giving a robot (client) on-board cognitive capabilities, the sensing and processing work are outsourced to a central computer (server) connected to the high-speed Internet, with only the moving capability provided by the robot. Our aim is to enhance human-robot interaction by increasing the performance of speaker recognition with multiple microphones on the robot side in adverse distant-talking environments. Our speaker recognizer provides the URC project with a basic interface for human-robot interaction.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.393-394
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• 2007

Speaker Recognition for the Intelligent Service Robot is implemented in this paper. For this purpose, we perform speaker recognition based on Gaussian Mixture Model(GMM) and use robot platform called WEVER, which is a Ubiquitous Robotic Companion(URC) intelligent service robot developed at Intelligent Robot Research Division in ETRI. The experimental results reveals that the approach presented in this paper yields a good identification (89.00%) performance within 2 meter distance.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.70-74
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• 2006

In this paper, We propose the real-time monitor and control mechanism based-on web service for intelligent robot called URC(Ubiquitous Robotic Companion). URC is intelligent robot designed to interact with external digital device that can communicate through wire or wireless. In this paper, we designed the result of this study into the target robot called NETTORO and proved its practical worth. we optimized web-service technology in Embedded system environment so that can monitor and control indoors in remote place through acquired information from various sensors / actuators and then we designed. Also, we described command port to WSDL, so that can apply variously such as web server or application program in AXIS engine through gSOAP transmission protocol.

• 한국HCI학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.02a
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• pp.190-194
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• 2008

This paper presents a speaker identification technique which is one of the basic techniques of the ubiquitous robot companion. Though the conventional mel-frequency cepstral coefficients guarantee high performance of speaker identification in clean condition, the performance is degraded dramatically in noise condition. To overcome this problem, we employed the relative autocorrelation sequence mel-frequency cepstral coefficient which is one of the noise robust features. However, there are two problems in relative autocorrelation sequence mel-frequency cepstral coefficient: 1) the limited information problem. 2) the residual noise problem. In this paper, to deal with these drawbacks, we propose a multi-streaming method for the limited information problem and a hybrid method for the residual noise problem. To evaluate proposed methods, noisy speech is used in which air conditioner noise, classic music, and vacuum noise are artificially added. Through experiments, proposed methods provide better performance of speaker identification than the conventional methods.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.1-6
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• 2010

For the personal robot to serve humans as a companion in our daily life, it is obviously important that the robot should have a long-term relationship to users. In this paper, we introduce a simple idea on how to make the long-term relationship by using just low-cost and simple robots. We also describe the robotic artificial creature system to implement this idea. The artificial creature robots respond not only physical environment changes but also the logical information changes in the virtual world such as the Web. They consist of a control robot and several simple robots, which show users various group behaviors. Users have a relationship with them by observing these behaviors, rather than interacting with them. We separate physical robots and software applications in order that artificial creature robots can have more various behaviors made by various software applications. Finally, we implemented the system using a robot simulator to show some example cases.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.13-18
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• 2009

The robotics industry, that is the major industry of the future and one of the new growth power, is actively studied around ETRI, that is the leading under state-run research institute of the advanced technique of U.S. and Japanese and knowledge economy part. And positive and negative and academic circles, the research institute, and the industrial circles communally pursue the intelligent service robot enterprise of a network-based called URC. This network-based intelligent robot does the RUPI2.0 platform and URC environment by the base. Therefore, a stability need to be enhanced in the through this near future when the research for the preexistence vulnerability analysis and security request is needed than the commercialized network-based intelligent robot in order to implement the network-based intelligent robot. Thus, in this paper, we propose the efficient authentication Framework which is suitable for the URC environment.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.240-250
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• 2010

A URC, which is a Ubiquitous Robot Companion, provides services to users in ubiquitous computing environments and has advantage of simplifying robot's hardware and software by distributing the complicated functionality of robots to other system. In this paper, we propose SOWL, which is a software architecture for URC robots and a mixed word of SOMAR and CAWL. SOWL keeps the advantages of URC and it also has the loosely-coupled characteristics. Moreover it makes it easy to develop of URC robot software. The proposed architecture is composed of 4 layers: device software, robot software, robot application, and end user layer. Developers of the each layer is able to build software suitable for their requirements by combining software modules in the lower layer. SOWL consists of SOMAR and CAWL engine. SOMAR, which is a middleware for the execution of device software and robot software, is based on service-oriented architecture(SOA) for robot software. CAWL engine is a system to process CAWL which is a context-aware workflow language. SOWL is able to provide a layered architecture for the execution of a robot software. It also makes it possible for developers of the each layer to build module-based robot software.