Activities
- Group1: Development of a CA which has a humanlike presence and a lifelikeness
- Group2: Research and development on unconstrained spoken dialogue
- Group3: Human level knowledge and concept acquisition
- Group4: Cooperative control of multiple CAs
- Group5: Development of CA platform
- Group6: Multidisciplinary investigation on how avatars and devices affect users
- Group7: Field experiments in the real world
- Group8: Avatar social ethics design
Group5: Development of CA platform
Latest Activity
Development of a platform, hierarchical cooperative control, and tele-operator allocation for CA (Takahiro MIYASHITA)
We are developing a Cybernetic Avatar (CA) platform. The CA platform is an information infrastructure (or software platform) that connects multiple CAs and multiple tele-operators, and has four basic functions as follows; (1) CA monitoring, (2) CA experience management, (3) Multiple CAs cooperative control, and (4) Tele-operator assignment. We are doing R&D for the functions of (3) and (4), and building the CA platform that incorporates all the results of the projects. So far, the overall architecture of the CA platform was formulated to be able to use for large-scale field experiments such as the 2025 Osaka/Kansai Expo. Along this architecture, we constructed the CA platform with the simple configuration as an initial prototype. The nature of service provision with CA depends on the type of CAs, the situation of tele-operators, the situation of CA service provision locations, and the types of CA services. We are developing a CA platform that meets the requirements of these diverse service provision conditions in various combinations, and functional verifications in the field experiments are in progress.
User/CA activity monitoring and management (Akira UTSUMI)
We are developing a CA (cybernetic avatar) platform that connects humans and CAs and its related components, especially mechanisms to provide user/CA monitoring and CA experience management functionalities. Data retrieved by user/CA monitoring contain a lot of valuable information regarding human daily activities. Total management of the monitoring data and CA operation history on the CA platform can greatly help efficient CA control and functional improvements of future CAs. In this subproject, in collaboration with other group 5 subprojects, we have developed a CA platform prototype which provides basic functions for human-CA communications including transmission and reception of audio-visual data, CA control commands, and sensory information, etc. We have also confirmed the effectiveness of user/CA monitoring and CA experience management in terms of reductions of the CA operation load due to the similarity of CA activities. Currently, we are working on optimization of the data transmission protocol to adapt to a large-scale human-CA communications, and development of service APIs for application programs to easily access monitoring data. Through these developments, we will extend the capabilities of the CA platform so that users of the platform can easily utilize the many research outputs of our projects.
Standardization for CAs (Takashi YOSHIMI)
We are carrying out standardization activities to make the functions of CA and the CA infrastructure protocol a global standard. The goal of our task is to standardize the basic technology of CA, which has been examined for ensuring inter-species interoperability and expandability of the number of CAs, as an international standard specification. Specifically, based on the formulation policy toward expanding of existing standard specifications of information communication and robot, we are promoting international standardization activities through the standardization consortium OMG, which has a proven track record in robot standardization. In the activities so far, we have made efforts to incorporate the specifications that describe the service functions of CA into the initial draft of ontology RoSO1.0 for describing the functional requirements of robot services, which is currently being developed by OMG. Also, OMG is planning to expand the specifications of RoIS. This is a specification description method for robot functional components for dialogue services and specification for specific common components. We also aim to include the CA-based platform specification in the lower layer, and the definition of modularized CA and operation interface functions in the upper layer of RoIS2.0, and we organized the elements required for these and proceeded with the RFP formulation process. We will continue to promote international standardization activities actively to achieve the goals of this issue.