Multimodal Fusion as Communicative Acts during Human-Robot Interaction

Research on dialog systems is a very active area in social robotics. During the last two decades, these systems have evolved from those based only on speech recognition and synthesis to the current and modern systems, which include new components and multimodality. By multimodal dialogue we mean the interchange of information among several interlocutors, not just using their voice as the mean of transmission but also all the available channels such as gestures, facial expressions, touch, sounds, etc. These channels add information to the message to be transmitted in every dialogue turn. The dialogue manager (IDiM) is one of the components of the robotic dialog system (RDS) and is in charge of managing the dialogue flow during the conversational turns. In order to do that, it is necessary to coherently treat the inputs and outputs of information that flow by different communication channels: audio, vision, radio frequency, touch, etc. In our approach, this multichannel input of information is temporarily fused into communicative acts (CAs). Each CA groups the information that flows through the different input channels into the same pack, transmitting a unique message or global idea. Therefore, this temporary fusion of information allows the IDiM to abstract from the channels used during the interaction, focusing only on the message, not on the way it is transmitted. This article presents the whole RDS and the description of how the multimodal fusion of information is made as CAs. Finally, several scenarios where the multimodal dialogue is used are presented.Comunidad de Madri

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion

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

Development of a Voice-Controlled Human-Robot Interface

The goal of this thesis is to develop a voice-controlled human-robot interface (HRI) which allows a person to control and communicate with a robot. Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a commercially available automatic speech recognition engine, was chosen for the development of the proposed HRI. In order to achieve the goal, the Dragon software is used to create custom commands (or macros) which must satisfy the tasks of (a) directly controlling the robot with voice, (b) writing a robot program with voice, and (c) developing a HRI which allows the human and robot to communicate with each other using speech. The key is to generate keystrokes upon recognizing the speech and three types of macro including step-by-step, macro recorder, and advanced scripting. Experiment was conducted in three phases to test the functionality of the developed macros in accomplishing all three tasks. The result showed that advanced scripting macro is the only type of macro that works. It is also the most suitable for the task because it is quick and easy to create and can be used to develop flexible and natural voice command. Since the output of macro is a series of keystrokes, which forms a syntax for the robot program, macros developed by the Dragon software can be used to communicate with virtually any robots by making an adjustment on the output keystroke

End-user programming of a social robot by dialog

One of the main challenges faced by social robots is how to provide intuitive, natural and enjoyable usability for the end-user. In our ordinary environment, social robots could be important tools for education and entertainment (edutainment) in a variety of ways. This paper presents a Natural Programming System (NPS) that is geared to non-expert users. The main goal of such a system is to provide an enjoyable interactive platform for the users to build different programs within their social robot platform. The end-user can build a complex net of actions and conditions (a sequence) in a social robot via mixed-initiative dialogs and multimodal interaction. The system has been implemented and tested in Maggie, a real social robot with multiple skills, conceived as a general HRI researching platform. The robot's internal features (skills) have been implemented to be verbally accessible to the end-user, who can combine them into others that are more complex following a bottom-up model. The built sequence is internally implemented as a Sequence Function Chart (SFC), which allows parallel execution, modularity and re-use. A multimodal Dialog Manager System (DMS) takes charge of keeping the coherence of the interaction. This work is thought for bringing social robots closer to non-expert users, who can play the game of "teaching how to do things" with the robot.The research leading to these results has received funding from the RoboCity2030-II-CM project (S2009/DPI-1559), funded by Programas de Actividades I+D en la Comunidad de Madrid and cofunded by Structural Funds of the EU. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the funds provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) through the project named “A New Approach to Social Robots” (AROS) DPI2008-01109

The Future of Humanoid Robots

This book provides state of the art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the field of humanoid robotics and its applications. It is expected that humanoids will change the way we interact with machines, and will have the ability to blend perfectly into an environment already designed for humans. The book contains chapters that aim to discover the future abilities of humanoid robots by presenting a variety of integrated research in various scientific and engineering fields, such as locomotion, perception, adaptive behavior, human-robot interaction, neuroscience and machine learning. The book is designed to be accessible and practical, with an emphasis on useful information to those working in the fields of robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational methods and other fields of science directly or indirectly related to the development and usage of future humanoid robots. The editor of the book has extensive R&D experience, patents, and publications in the area of humanoid robotics, and his experience is reflected in editing the content of the book