Development of Meal Partner Robot and Applications Towards Enriching Mealtime Experience

Co-eating which means eating with others has many positive effects and enriches our lives. However, many people, including elderly people living alone and children whose parents are both working, tend to eat alone in the current social situation. We believe that a robot that embodies in the real world and can interact in real-time can be a good meal partner. In this paper, we described the development and applications of a meal partner robot. We present the robot's design concept and the configuration of hardware and software, from the viewpoint that a robot that serves as a meal partner needs to have the ability to behave as if it were eating a meal with humans. We also developed the dialogue interaction system for food delivery and eating behavior expression using the chest and hand monitors of the robot, as an application example of the meal partner robot.