Towards a Higher Level of Human-Robot Interaction and Integration

Abstract

Spartacus, our 2005 AAAI Mobile Robot Challenge entry, integrated planning and scheduling, sound source localization, tracking and separation, message reading, speech recognition and generation, and autonomous navigation capabilities onboard a custom-made interactive robot. Integration of such a high number of capabilities revealed interesting new issues such as coordinating audio/visual/graphical capabilities, monitoring the impacts of the capabilities in usage by the robot, and inferring the robot’s intentions and goals. Our 2006 entry will be used to address these issues, add new capabilities to the robot and improving our software and computational architectures, with the objective of increasing the level, evaluating and improving our understanding of human-robot interaction and integration with an autonomous mobile platform. Challenges Designing a mobile robot that must operate in public settings probably addresses the most complete set of issues related to autonomous and interactive mobile robots, with system integration playing a fundamental role at all levels. Reported issues are 1) the robust integration of different software packages and intelligent decision-making capabilities; 2) natural interaction modalities in open settings; 3) adaptation to environmental changes for localization; and 4) monitoring/reporting decisions made by the robot (Gockley