Dialogue Generation for Robot Family Using ROS and Generative AI: Initial Implementation of Centralized and Distributed Systems

The problem of human isolation and loneliness is growing worldwide. Although there are ways to provide human support, there are sustainability issues, so support using conversational physical partners, such as robots, is attracting attention as an alternative solution. Most previous attempts have been based on a single robot, and there are few attempts that use multiple robots, especially those that form a family and try to save the user from isolation and loneliness. This study aims to develop a basic infrastructure system to realize such a family consisting of multiple robots and a single human. More specifically, in this paper we report on the implementation and preliminary verification of two types of dialogue generation for robots using ROS (Robot Operating System) and GPT-4o- mini: one is a centralized system (in which the command center generates conversation scenarios for each robot in batches) and the other is a distributed system (in which each robot generates conversations individually).