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User recognition is one of the most fundamental functionalities for intelligent service robots. However, in robot applications, the conditions are far severer compared to the traditional biometric security systems. The robots should be able to recognize users non-intrusively, which confines the available biometric features to face and voice. Also, the robots are expected to recognize users from relatively...
This paper presents a text-independent speaker identification system using multiple microphones on the robot, which is intended for use in human-robot interaction. For the purpose of the best possible classification rate in speaker identification, the individual identification results obtained from multiple microphones on the robot are combined by various combination schemes. The performance improvement...
Over the past several years, many humanoid robots have been developed, and they can typically make sophisticated human-like expressions with their head and arms. We believe that humanoid robots will be suitable for communicating with people. The human-like bodies of humanoid robots enable humans to intuitively understand their gestures and cause people to unconsciously behave as if they were communicating...
An important goal for research on service robots is the cooperation of a human and a robot as team. A service robot in a domestic environment needs to build a representation of its future workspace that corresponds to the human user's understanding of these surroundings. But it also needs to apply this model about the "where" and "what" in its current interaction to allow communication...
Autism covers a large spectrum of disorders that affect the individual's way of interacting socially and is often revealed by the individual's lack of interest in gazing at human faces. Currently Autism is diagnosed in children no younger than 2 years old. This paper presents a new monitoring device, the WearCam, to help forming a diagnosis of this neurodevelopmental disorder at an earlier age than...
Robot programming by demonstration (RbD) covers methods by which a robot learns new skills through human guidance. In this work, we take the perspective that the role of the teacher is more important than just being a model of successful behaviour, and present a probabilistic framework for RbD which allows to extract incrementally the essential characteristics of a task described at a trajectory level...
One way in which a robotic system might be considered 'intelligent' may be an ability to learn and then generalise its learnt abilities in situations not previously encountered. Thus the ability to learn may be a prerequisite in allowing a robot to be adaptable when coping with changing environments, be useful when dealing with changing user requirements and expectations as well as being in itself...
This paper introduces a methodology for human-robot interaction (HRI) experiments that involves soliciting the general public for participation. In particular, it reviews a series of HRI usability experiments with visitors to the Saint Louis Science Center and the Museum of Idaho's annual Science and Engineering Expo between the years 2003 and 2006. During these events visitors to the museums evaluated...
The present article describes a scenario and respective neuro-cognitive psychological methods for the investigation of human-machine interaction in a factory context. Due to a growing demand for flexible production systems, adaptive interfaces for the optimal support of workers in manufacturing become increasingly relevant. Interacting in a complex production environment requires the acting person...
Intuitive human-robot cooperation presents a challenge to robots since it demands of them a high level of understanding of the human user. Our approach is to estimate the human intention and select and proactively execute an appropriate robot task without requiring an explicit user command. This paper describes the concept and details of our proactive execution module and how it forms an integral...
This paper reviews the literature related to the use of psychophysiology measures in human-robot interaction (HRI) studies in an effort to address the fundamental question of appropriate metrics and methodologies for evaluating HRI research, especially affect. It identifies four main methods of evaluation in HRI studies: (1) self-report measures, (2) behavioral measures, (3) psychophysiology measures,...
In human-robot interaction (HRI), interactivity is a critical issue in terms of how they understand each other and what makes them share grounds to communicate. This paper proposes measures to evaluate interaction process using information theoretic approach. The measures are designed to quantify the level of shared ground among agents and their environment. With these measures, an experiment is carried...
Teaching a robot new skills may require that the teacher scaffolds the teaching experience appropriately. However, due to inherent assumptions made by a human teacher the scaffolding process may in some circumstances fail to effectively teach the robot. Here we illustrate this issue in two simple robot teaching exploratory studies and examine the assumptions made by the teacher when teaching the robot...
This paper focuses on the problem that will arise in the near future from multi-function robots. Users will have to read thick operation manuals to use them. If users can use these robots without reading difficult manuals, it will improve user efficiency. We then proposed action sloping as a way for users to naturally recognize a robot's function. It provides the robots with gradual feedback signals...
This paper presents a case study of edutainment robot, which is an intelligent robot for educational use with a voice-QA model applied. The emphatic functions of our robot are: analyzing spoken question from a student, finding an appropriate answer in Korean encyclopedia, and then serving the answer with speech synthesis. We develop the ESTk, which is an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system based...
This paper presents techniques that enable talker tracking for effective human-robot interaction. To track moving people in daily-life environments, localizing multiple moving sounds is necessary so that robots can locate talkers. However, the conventional method requires an array of microphones and impulse response data. Therefore, we propose a way to integrate a cross-power spectrum phase analysis...
The robot space is a ubiquitous environment in which the networked robot plays the role of main mediator that accepts the sensor data from the environment, interprets the data to understand the situation, and decides the actions to perform. Semantic robot space provides the high-level data model of the robot space that enables context-aware service execution. We designed the semantic robot space based...
The "uncanny valley" must be avoided from the viewpoint of communication robot design, while this is an essential phenomenon for discovering the principles relevant to establishing social interaction between human and robot. Studying the uncanny valley allows us to explore the boundary of human-likeness. We have empirically and experimentally obtained evidence to show the uncanny valley...
The ultimate goal of intelligent robots is to provide various and practical services that satisfy human's needs. To provide various services, it is important to develop an intelligence system, capable of being flexible and adaptable to uncertain dynamic environment in robot's working space. In other words, it is necessary to obtain automatic modeling technologies for environment perceptions such as...
This paper describes experimental investigation how agents' appearances affect users' interpretations of agents' attitudes. Specifically, we conducted a psychological experiment that participants were presented artificial sounds as subtle expressions that can make human estimate specific agents' primitive attitudes from three kinds of different agents, e.g., Mindstonns robot, AIBO robot, and normal...
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