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Kinesthetic teaching is an approach to providing demonstrations to a robot in Learning from Demonstration whereby a human physically guides a robot to perform a skill. In the common usage of kinesthetic teaching, the robot's trajectory during a demonstration is recorded from start to end. In this paper we consider an alternative, keyframe demonstrations, in which the human provides a sparse set of...
This paper describes a Behavior Markup Language (BML) realizer that we developed for use in our research on human-robot interaction. Existing BML realizers used with virtual agents are based on fixed-timing algorithms and because of that are not suitable for robotic applications. Our realizer uses an event-driven architecture, based on Petri nets, to guarantee the specified synchronization constraints...
Human-robot communication is often faced with the difficult problem of interpreting ambiguous auditory data. For example, the acoustic signals perceived by a humanoid with its on-board microphones contain a mix of sounds such as speech, music, electronic devices, all in the presence of attenuation and reverberations. In this paper we propose a novel method, based on a generative probabilistic model...
This work aims to realize multimodal interaction with embodied contextual understanding based on the simple chatterbot system. A system framework is proposed to integrate the dialogue system into a 3D simulation platform, SIGVerse to attain multimodal interaction. The chatterbot AIML implementations are described in the achievement of the conversations with embodied contextual understanding in HRI...
A novel multimodal robotic scrub nurse (RSN) system for the operating room (OR) is presented. The RSN assists the main surgeon by passing surgical instruments. Experiments were conducted to test the system with speech and gesture modalities and average instrument acquisition times were compared. Experimental results showed that 97% of the gestures were recognized correctly under changes in scale and...
Social robots have to potential to serve as personal, organizational, and public assistants as, for instance, diet coaches, teacher's aides, and emergency respondents. The success of these robots — whether in motivating users to adhere to a diet regimen or in encouraging them to follow evacuation procedures in the case of a fire — will rely largely on their ability to persuade people. Research in...
This paper presents a communication robot that can generate a referent identification conversation with human users. First, we conduct an experiment to collect face-to-face referent identification communication and investigate how the referent is identified by exchanging multiple speech turns between the participants. On the basis of the experimental observations, we implement a communication robot...
Speech is one of the most natural medium for human communication, which makes it vital to human-robot interaction. In real environments where robots are deployed, distant-talking speech recognition is difficult to realize due to the effects of reverberation. This leads to the degradation of speech recognition and understanding, and hinders a seamless human-robot interaction. To minimize this problem,...
In multimodal human-robot interaction(HRI), the process of communication can be established through verbal, nonverbal, and/or para-verbal cues. The linguistic literature [3] shows that para-verbal and non-verbal communications are naturally synchronized. This research focuses on the relation between non-verbal and para-verbal communication by mapping prosody cues to the corresponding arm gestures...
When a user is about to use a new function on a robot or machinery, the user is required to: 1) understand the rules regarding the use of the function, and 2) confirm that the environment, in which the robot or machinery is operating, is suitable for the use of the new function. Failure to confirm these requirements may lead to higher accident rates, creating potentially hazardous conditions for the...
Cooperative robotic systems, such as unmanned aircraft systems, are becoming technologically mature enough to be integrated into civil society. To gain practical use and acceptance, a verifiable, principled and well-defined foundation for interactions between human operators and autonomous systems is needed. In this paper, we propose and specify such a formally grounded collaboration framework. Collaboration...
In this paper we present the two steps system of localization and tracking to work in context of simultaneous speakers. The localization algorithm is based on time-frequency method which uses an array of three microphones and it enables to locate multiple sound sources in a single time-frame. Localization results with missing detection and clutter are post-processed by the Probability Hypothesis Density...
In this paper we present an experiment addressing the effect of voice pitch on the evaluation of a social robot receptionist. Twenty eight test participants interacted with two “female” robot characters: one with a high-pitched, exuberant voice, the other with a low-pitched, calm voice. Our results show that the high pitch robot was perceived significantly more attractive in terms of voice, behavior...
In order to enable natural human-robot interaction, robots will have to acquire the skills to detect and meaningfully integrate information from multiple modalities. In this paper, we focus on efficient voice activity detection (VAD) in the context of a multi-sensory robot device that uses audio activity information to drive perceptual function to yield natural and intuitive response to human behavior...
Robotic systems are today capable of performing patrolling and surveillance tasks in indoor structured environments. However, they need to be designed by taking into account the operational environment and the specific task to be accomplished. This dependency from the specific features of task and environment (contextual information, according to Turner [11]), severely restricts their practical deployment...
Social signal processing has the ambitious goal of bridging the social intelligence gap between computers and humans. Nowadays, computers are not only the new interaction partners of humans, but also a privileged interaction medium for social exchange between humans. Consequently, enhancing machine abilities to interpret and reproduce social signals is a crucial requirement for improving computer-mediated...
Pitch extraction is important for communication robots, since pitch may carry information about intention, attitude or emotion expression from the user's speech. However, current pitch extraction methods are not robust enough in real noisy environments. In the present work, we propose pitch extraction methods by combining microphone array and auditory scene analysis technologies, and evaluate pitch...
Whole-body gestures and verbal expressions should be bound according to given tasks and the current situation in intelligent human-robot interaction systems. Moreover, modification of expressions, such as emphasis of motions and change in verbal expressions, plays an important roll for successfully completing tasks according to user reaction. Slight differences in motions can be conveyed by binding...
Robot audition, which aims at multiple simultaneous human-robot communications in noisy environments, has undergone rapid development since last decade. For a common scenario, robot audition systems usually generate a huge amount of chronological data. These data fall into several categories: sound source locations and orientations, separated sound sources and recognized speeches. In order to efficiently...
Using pre-recorded templates to estimate and suppress the ego noise of a robot is advantageous because this method is able to cope with the non-stationarity of this particular type of noise. However, standard template-based estimation requires human intervention in the offline training sessions, storage of large amounts of data and does not adapt to the dynamical changes in the environmental conditions...
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