PROT — An embodied agent for intelligible and user-friendly human-robot interaction

A system has been developed that can project an embodied agent's image and sound anywhere in a room. It can thus overcome the problems inherent to other embodied agents in dealing with 2D on-screen information and 3D physical information simultaneously. An experiment demonstrated that this `PROT' agent can effectively present both on-screen information and real-world physical information. Because the PROT agent combines the advantages of a robot agent with those of an on-screen agent, it should improve human-robot interaction.