A Robotic Interface for Retrieval of Distributed Multimedia Content

In a social setting, it is often beneficial to have a partner that is alert of the environment and the circumstances and is able to communicate information that otherwise does not come to our awareness. Typically, these are human companions, however a robotic partner may be an alternate solution. For a robotic partner to be successful, it must naturally interact with its user, and be able to retrieve data and analyze its content. In this paper we present Iolaus, a robotic partner for social settings. Iolaus can be implemented as a robotic parrot perched on the user's shoulder, or as an attentive companion similar to a Seeing Eye dog. When the user enters a new social setting the robot can be asked and should attempt to answer questions regarding people and surroundings, very similar to a human partner. In this phase of the project, we are using the Sony Aibo robot dog to implement Iolaus's information retrieval component demonstrating how a human-robot interface can help the user access a vast amount of distributed information and multimedia content in a socially acceptable manner.