11,596 research outputs found
Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey
Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their
environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important
to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system
and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development.
Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic
systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through
embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems.
Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can
smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an
understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The
embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a
symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of
research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive
approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is
socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical
interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and
developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research
topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a
double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their
embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual
information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech
signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future
directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic
Multimodal Signal Processing and Learning Aspects of Human-Robot Interaction for an Assistive Bathing Robot
We explore new aspects of assistive living on smart human-robot interaction
(HRI) that involve automatic recognition and online validation of speech and
gestures in a natural interface, providing social features for HRI. We
introduce a whole framework and resources of a real-life scenario for elderly
subjects supported by an assistive bathing robot, addressing health and hygiene
care issues. We contribute a new dataset and a suite of tools used for data
acquisition and a state-of-the-art pipeline for multimodal learning within the
framework of the I-Support bathing robot, with emphasis on audio and RGB-D
visual streams. We consider privacy issues by evaluating the depth visual
stream along with the RGB, using Kinect sensors. The audio-gestural recognition
task on this new dataset yields up to 84.5%, while the online validation of the
I-Support system on elderly users accomplishes up to 84% when the two
modalities are fused together. The results are promising enough to support
further research in the area of multimodal recognition for assistive social
HRI, considering the difficulties of the specific task. Upon acceptance of the
paper part of the data will be publicly available
- …