39,728 research outputs found
Embedding Robotic Agents in the Social Environment
This paper discusses the interactive vision approach, which advocates using knowledge from the human sciences on the structure and dynamics of human-human interaction in the development of machine vision systems and interactive robots. While this approach is discussed generally, the particular case of the system being developed for the Aurora project (which aims to produce a robot to be used as a tool in the therapy of children with autism) is especially considered, with description of the design of the machine vision system being employed and discussion of ideas from the human sciences with particular reference to the Aurora system. An example architecture for a simple interactive agent, which will likely form the basis for the first implementation of this system, is briefly described and a description of hardware used for the Aurora system is given.Peer reviewe
Conceptual spatial representations for indoor mobile robots
We present an approach for creating conceptual representations of human-made indoor environments using mobile
robots. The concepts refer to spatial and functional properties of typical indoor environments. Following ļ¬ndings
in cognitive psychology, our model is composed of layers representing maps at diļ¬erent levels of abstraction. The
complete system is integrated in a mobile robot endowed with laser and vision sensors for place and object recognition.
The system also incorporates a linguistic framework that actively supports the map acquisition process, and which
is used for situated dialogue. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the integrated system
Multi-Modal Human-Machine Communication for Instructing Robot Grasping Tasks
A major challenge for the realization of intelligent robots is to supply them
with cognitive abilities in order to allow ordinary users to program them
easily and intuitively. One way of such programming is teaching work tasks by
interactive demonstration. To make this effective and convenient for the user,
the machine must be capable to establish a common focus of attention and be
able to use and integrate spoken instructions, visual perceptions, and
non-verbal clues like gestural commands. We report progress in building a
hybrid architecture that combines statistical methods, neural networks, and
finite state machines into an integrated system for instructing grasping tasks
by man-machine interaction. The system combines the GRAVIS-robot for visual
attention and gestural instruction with an intelligent interface for speech
recognition and linguistic interpretation, and an modality fusion module to
allow multi-modal task-oriented man-machine communication with respect to
dextrous robot manipulation of objects.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure
Who am I talking with? A face memory for social robots
In order to provide personalized services and to
develop human-like interaction capabilities robots need to rec-
ognize their human partner. Face recognition has been studied
in the past decade exhaustively in the context of security systems
and with significant progress on huge datasets. However, these
capabilities are not in focus when it comes to social interaction
situations. Humans are able to remember people seen for a
short moment in time and apply this knowledge directly in
their engagement in conversation. In order to equip a robot with
capabilities to recall human interlocutors and to provide user-
aware services, we adopt human-human interaction schemes to
propose a face memory on the basis of active appearance models
integrated with the active memory architecture. This paper
presents the concept of the interactive face memory, the applied
recognition algorithms, and their embedding into the robotās
system architecture. Performance measures are discussed for
general face databases as well as scenario-specific datasets
On the simulation of interactive non-verbal behaviour in virtual humans
Development of virtual humans has focused mainly in two broad areas - conversational agents and computer game characters. Computer game characters have traditionally been action-oriented - focused on the game-play - and conversational agents have been focused on sensible/intelligent conversation. While virtual humans have incorporated some form of non-verbal behaviour, this has been quite limited and more importantly not connected or connected very loosely with the behaviour of a real human interacting with the virtual human - due to a lack of sensor data and no system to respond to that data. The interactional aspect of non-verbal behaviour is highly important in human-human interactions and previous research has demonstrated that people treat media (and therefore virtual humans) as real people, and so interactive non-verbal behaviour is also important in the development of virtual humans. This paper presents the challenges in creating virtual humans that are non-verbally interactive and drawing corollaries with the development history of control systems in robotics presents some approaches to solving these challenges - specifically using behaviour based systems - and shows how an order of magnitude increase in response time of virtual humans in conversation can be obtained and that the development of rapidly responding non-verbal behaviours can start with just a few behaviours with more behaviours added without difficulty later in development
Interactive Perception Based on Gaussian Process Classification for House-Hold Objects Recognition and Sorting
We present an interactive perception model for
object sorting based on Gaussian Process (GP) classification
that is capable of recognizing objects categories from point
cloud data. In our approach, FPFH features are extracted from
point clouds to describe the local 3D shape of objects and
a Bag-of-Words coding method is used to obtain an object-level
vocabulary representation. Multi-class Gaussian Process
classification is employed to provide and probable estimation of
the identity of the object and serves a key role in the interactive
perception cycle ā modelling perception confidence. We show
results from simulated input data on both SVM and GP based
multi-class classifiers to validate the recognition accuracy of our
proposed perception model. Our results demonstrate that by
using a GP-based classifier, we obtain true positive classification
rates of up to 80%. Our semi-autonomous object sorting
experiments show that the proposed GP based interactive
sorting approach outperforms random sorting by up to 30%
when applied to scenes comprising configurations of household
objects
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