• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.12-21
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• 2021

This article presents the future vision and core technologies of the "Life Companion Robot," which is one of the 12 future concepts introduced in the ETRI Technology Roadmap published in November 2020. Assistant robots, care robots, and life support robots were proposed as the development stages of life companion robots. Further, core technologies for each of the ten major roles that must be directly or indirectly performed by life companion robots are introduced. Finally, this article describes in detail three major artificial intelligence technologies for autonomous robots.

• Journal of the Korea Knowledge Information Technology Society
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.327-339
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• 2018

This study is on the elderly people's use and experience of pet robots (companion robots). Applying companion robots for the elderly's daily lives can enhance their quality of life. Leisure is main activity of the elderly who are out of work. Therefore, the quality and diversity of leisure can affect the quality of their life. Companion Robots could provide them with more advanced and interesting experiences. Around the world, population aging becomes one of the most important trends in each country. The social and economic burden of aging is serious challenge on sustainability of the world, including S. Korea. The authors examine use of Companion Robots for elderly (from 50 years old to 90 years old). In this experiment, the authors study and measure many factors including system quality, interface quality, displeasure, enjoyment, willingness to reuse, perception on new technology. In regression analysis, intimacy(t=-2.006, p<.05) is significant factor on displeasure of Companion Robot. In another regression, displeasure of Companion Robot (independent variable) is significant factor on enjoyment(t=-3.327, p<.01) and willingness to reuse(t=-2.636, p<.01). Therefore, when elderly one feels less displeasure of Companion Robot, he/she feels more enjoyment and willingness to reuse. As a result, the elderly who don't familiar to new technology could improve quality of life and leisure activity by using companion robot.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.666-676
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• 2005

In recent years, motivated by the emergence of ubiquitous computing technologies, a new class of networked robots, ubiquitous robots, has been introduced. The Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC) is our conceptual vision of ubiquitous service robots that provide users with the services they need, anytime and anywhere in ubiquitous computing environments. To realize the vision of URC, one of the essential requirements for robotic systems is to support ubiquity of services: that is, a robot service must be always available even though there are changes in the service environments. Specifically robotic systems need to be automatically interoperable with sensors and devices in current service environments, rather than statically preprogrammed for them. In this paper, the design and implementation of a semantic-based ubiquitous robotic space (SemanticURS) is presented. SemanticURS enables automated integration of networked robots into ubiquitous computing environments exploiting Semantic Web Services and AI-based planning technologies.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.288-298
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• 2008

We introduce new type of networked robot, Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC), embedded with ATLAS Service-oriented architecture for enhancing the space sensing capability. URC is a network-based robotic system developed by ETRI. For years of experience in deploying service with ATLAS sensor platform for elder and people with special needs in smart houses, we need networked robots to assist elder people in their successful daily living. Recently, pervasive computing technologies reveals possibilities of networked robots in smart spaces, consist of sensors, actuators and smart devices can collaborate with the other networked robot as a mobile sensing platform, a complex and sophisticated actuator and a human interface. This paper provides our experience in designing and implementing system architecture to integrate URC robots in pervasive computing environments using the University of Florida's ATLAS service-oriented architecture. In this paper, we focus on the integrated framework architecture of URC embedded with ATLAS platform. We show how the integrated URC system is enabled to provide better services which enhance the space sensing of URC in the smart space by applying service-oriented architecture characterized as flexibility in adding or deleting service components of Ubiquitous Robotic Companion.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.19 no.10
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• pp.469-489
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• 2021

This study explores consumers' responses to socially assistive robotics by using text-mining method focusing on Companion Pets from Hasbro as it gives emotional support. We conducted text frequency analysis, LDA analysis using R programming. The key findings are 1)the most frequently used words the mimicry of living pets and the appearance of companion pets, 2)the five topics were derived from the LDA analysis and classified keywords in each topic split between positive and negative, 3)user, product, environment affect the interaction between consumer and companion pets, 4)consumers who have difficulty in cognition and physical conditions use companion pets to replace living pets. This study provides an understanding of consumer responses in companion pets and gives practical implications that may improve the efficacy of usage for consumers and understand the companion robot, which provides emotional support in COVID-19.

• 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 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 Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.66-71
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• 2006

Recently, there are lots of concerning on ubiquitous environment of robots and URC (Ubiquitous Robotic Companion). In this paper, a practical ubiquitous interface system far controlling mobile robots in indoor environments was proposed. The interface system was designed as a manager-agent model including a PC manager, a mobile manager, and robot agents for being able to be accessed by any network. In the system, the PC manager has a 3D virtual environment and shows real images for a human-friendly interface, and share the computation load of the robot such as path planning and managing geographical information. It also contains Hybrid Format Manager(HFM) working for transforming the image, position, and control data and interchanging them between the robots and the managers. Mobile manager working in the minimized computing condition of handsets has a mobile interface environment displaying the real images and the position of the robot and being able to control the robots by pressing keys. Experimental results showed the proposed system was able to control robots rising wired and wireless LAN and mobile Internet.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2005.10b
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• pp.252-254
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• 2005

In this paper, we present a design for URC (Ubiquitous Robotics Companion) robot S/W platform. The URC robot S/W platform is based on the Qplus/Esto which is developing in ETRI and applied for URC robot reference S/W platform that we use it in case of many different robots with same interface. We expect the platform to save the developing time, to improve the compatibility and to reuse the developed contents.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.2129-2136
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• 2012

With the increased demand of ubiquitous home services, intelligent robots have wide attentions. This kind of robots offer various services through middleware components which can connect with remote servers. In this paper we present an UPnP(Universal Plug and Play) based open-source software framework which makes control the robots remotely. This UPnP architecture for home networking can provide various communication methodologies like command control, eventing, presentation with web services and so on. This paper shows successful implementation results on two real platforms.