Personal Robots as Ubiquitous-Multimedial-Mobile Web Interfaces Javier Ruiz-del-Solar Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile Abstract Personal robots are designed to provide entertainment, companion and communication interfaces. They can play an important role as natural, flexible and non-invasive interfaces to access the Web. The use of personal robots as Web interfaces is in concordance with the tendency of integrating Web technologies in the normal human activities. In general terms, we propose that personal robots can implement the everyday computing paradigm, which basically scales ubiquitous computing with respect to time. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to propose the use of personal robots as ubiquitous, multimedial, mobile, self-personalized, natural and empathic Web and Internet interfaces. We introduce Bender, a personal robot whose design incorporates these ideas. 1. Introduction Personal robots are becoming of increasing interest in the robotics community. A personal robot is a subclass of a mobile service robot designed to interact with humans and to behave as a partner, providing entertainment, companion and communication interfaces. It is usually expected that the personal robot’s morphology and dimensions allow him to adequately operate in human environments. The R2D2 and C3PO robots from the Star Wars saga are typical examples of personal robots. It is projected that personal robots will play a fundamental role in the next years as companions for elderly people and as entertainment machines. Among other abilities personal robots should be able to: (i) move in human environments, (ii) interact with humans using human-like codes (speech, face and hand gestures), (iii) manipulate objects, (iv) determine the identity of the human user (e.g. “owner 1”, “owner 2”, “unknown user”, “Peter”) and its mood (e.g. happy, sad, excited) for personalizing its services, (v) store and reproduce digital multimedia material (images, videos, music, digitized books), and (vi) connect humans with data or telephone networks. In addition, (vii) they should be empathic (humans should like them), and (viii) their use should be natural and not require any technical or computational knowledge. On the other hand, some new tendencies indicate that Web and Internet technologies should be integrated into the normal human activities, and that humans should not need to alter their normal activities for accessing these technologies. The idea is not that humans go to a computer every time they need some specific information, but that the computer is always accessible for the human. Consequently, it seems clear that personal robots can play an important role as natural, flexible and non-invasive interfaces to access Web and Internet services. Thus, personal robots can serve as Web and Internet interfaces with the following characteristics: - multimedial: the user access Web and Internet services using different media like speech, hand and face gestures, or normal keyboard. This allows the user to carry out different activities while accessing the Web, - mobile: the robot-based interface follows the user when it moves, or when it is called by her, - ubiquitous: as a consequence of having a multimedial and mobile interface that operates near the user, the access to Web and Internet services become ubiquitous, - self-personalized: the robot-based interface recognize automatically the identity and mood of the user, and personalizes its services according to the detected identity and situation (e.g. the user is a child and it is sad). In addition, thanks to the fact that personal robots are empathic and designed to be used by the non-expert, their application as Web interfaces can expand the use of Web and Internet technologies to humans that normally do not use computers (e.g. elderly people). They can also expand the use of these technologies to people with disabilities for whom the traditional mouse and keyboard are less accessible. In addition, personal robots can increase the web use to situations where currently they are not being used. For example, while watering the grass in the backyard, a user could ask for the weather at midnight to its personal robot, or while having dinner with the family, a child could ask to the family service robot for some information related with the current conversation. Figure 1 shows an example of a possible search for weather information using a Fifth Latin American Web Congress 0-7695-3008-7/07 $25.00 © 2007 IEEE DOI 10.1109/LA-Web.2007.23 120