Natural Interaction Design of a Humanoid Robot

Abstract

Designing robots that interact naturally with people requires the integration of technologies and algorithms for communication modalities such as gestures, movement, facial expressions and user interfaces. To understand interdependence among these modalities, evaluating the integrated design in feasibility studies provides insights about key considerations regarding the robot and potential interaction scenarios, allowing the design to be iteratively refined before larger-scale experiments are planned and conducted. This paper presents three feasibility studies with IRL-1, a new humanoid robot integrating compliant actuators for motion and manipulation along with artificial audition, vision, and facial expressions. These studies explore distinctive capabilities of IRL-1, including the ability to be physically guided by perceiving forces through elastic actuators used for active steering of the omnidirectional platform; the integration of vision, motion and audition for an augmented telepresence interface; and the influence of delays in responding to sounds. In addition to demonstrating how these capabilities can be exploited in human-robot interaction, this paper illustrates intrinsic interrelations between design and evaluation of IRL-1, such as the influence of the contact point in physically guiding the platform, the synchronization between sensory and robot representations in the graphical display, and facial gestures for responsiveness when computationally expensive processes are used. It also outlines ideas regarding more advanced experiments that could be conducted with the platform.

Visualisation of Sound Source Location in a Teleoperation Interface for a Mobile Robot

“…The experimental setup consists of using IRL-1/TR [1], a humanoid torso installed on top of a differential drive mobile Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.…”

Hello robot can you come here?

“…To do so, we developed ROS4iOS 1 , a native port of ROS [6] allowing to seamlessly use data from mobile iOS devices to be processed on a robot. To demonstrate this capability, this video presentation illustrates how ROS4iOS has been used to implement an assistance scenario: a person in a remote location asks our IRL-1 [1] robot for assistance, and IRL-1 must recognize the person's voice, identify the remote location using images taken from the mobile device, navigate to the identified location and interact vocally with the person through the mobile device. When communication with the robot is established by launching a specific iOS application, audio from the mobile device is published on a single topic and directed toward two ROS nodes on IRL-1.…”

Coordination mechanism for integrated design of Human-Robot Interaction scenarios

“…ManyEars [45] is the sound source localization, tracking and separation algorithm used with the 8-microphone array on IRL-1. IRL-1 can be installed on an omnidirectional, non-holonomic and compliant mobile platform [43] or on a differential-drive mobile base (referred to as TR for Telerobot) [46], as shown in Fig. 3.…”

“…The robot platform used is IRL-1/TR [22,43]. IRL-1 is a humanoid platform with an expressive face, an orientable head, a 8-microphone array located around its torso, a color USB camera with a panoramic lens from Immervision (IMV), a Microsoft Kinect sensor, a Hokuyo UTM-30LX laser range finder on top of its mobile base, a wireless gamepad from Logitech, two compliant arms with four degrees of freedom (DOF) each and grippers.…”