A card-playing humanoid playmate for human behavioral analysis

This paper presents the groundwork for developing a humanoid playmate that is capable to play a poker game with people. In order for humanoid to interact socially with people in the poker game, it is required to have the ability to interpret and infer the human nonverbal behaviors. In this paper, we first describe the development of the humanoid playmate. The card manipulation and the humanoid movements were realized to play the poker game with people in real environment. We then observed human nonverbal responses through a psychological experiment to compare the difference between human–human and human–robot poker game. Based on the results, visual perception system of the humanoid playmate was implemented for recognition of the human nonverbal behaviors and poker card suits. Finally, the developed visual perception system was evaluated by comparing amount of counting the human nonverbal behaviors between human coder and the visual perception system.