A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Combining heterogeneous inputs for the development of adaptive and multimodal interaction systems

In this paper we present a novel framework for the integration of visual sensor networks and speech-based interfaces. Our proposal follows the standard reference architecture in fusion systems (JDL), and combines different techniques related to Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and User Modeling to provide an enhanced interaction with their users. Firstly, the framework integrates a Cooperative Surveillance Multi-Agent System (CS-MAS), which includes several types of autonomous agents working in a coalition to track and make inferences on the positions of the targets. Secondly, enhanced conversational agents facilitate human-computer interaction by means of speech interaction. Thirdly, a statistical methodology allows modeling the user conversational behavior, which is learned from an initial corpus and improved with the knowledge acquired from the successive interactions. A technique is proposed to facilitate the multimodal fusion of these information sources and consider the result for the decision of the next system action.This work was supported in part by Projects MEyC TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS S2009/TIC-1485Publicad

Towards a synthetic tutor assistant: The EASEL project and its architecture

Robots are gradually but steadily being introduced in our daily lives. A paramount application is that of education, where robots can assume the role of a tutor, a peer or simply a tool to help learners in a specific knowledge domain. Such endeavor posits specific challenges: affective social behavior, proper modelling of the learner’s progress, discrimination of the learner’s utterances, expressions and mental states, which, in turn, require an integrated architecture combining perception, cognition and action. In this paper we present an attempt to improve the current state of robots in the educational domain by introducing the EASEL EU project. Specifically, we introduce the EASEL’s unified robot architecture, an innovative Synthetic Tutor Assistant (STA) whose goal is to interactively guide learners in a science-based learning paradigm, allowing us to achieve such rich multimodal interactions

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

The EASEL project: Towards educational human-robot symbiotic interaction

This paper presents the EU EASEL project, which explores the potential impact and relevance of a robot in educational settings. We present the project objectives and the theorectical background on which the project builds, briefly introduce the EASEL technological developments, and end with a summary of what we have learned from the evaluation studies carried out in the project so far