Biron–the bielefeld robot companion

2003

To an increasing extent, robots are being designed to become a part of the lives of ordinary people. This calls for new models of the interaction between humans and robots, taking advantage of human social and communicative skills. Furthermore, humanrobot relationships must be understood in the context of use of robots, and based on empirical studies of humans and robots in real settings. This paper discusses social aspects of interaction with a service robot, departing from our experiences of designing a fetch-and-carry robot for motion-impaired users in an office environment. We present the motivations behind the design of the Cero robot, especially its communication paradigm. Finally, we discuss experiences from a recent usage study, and research issues emerging from this work. A conclusion is that addressing only the primary user in service robotics is unsatisfactory, and that the focus should be on the setting, activities and social interactions of the group of people where the robot is to be used.

International Journal of Social Robotics (SORO), 2013

The operation of robotic tour guides in public museums leads to a variety of interactions of these complex technical systems with humans of all ages and with different technical backgrounds. Interacting with a robot is a new experience for many visitors. An intuitive user interface, preferable one that resembles the interaction between human tour guides and visitors, simplifies the communication between robot and visitors. To allow for supportive behavior of the guided persons, predictable robot behavior is necessary. Humanoid robots are able to resemble human motions and behaviors and look familiar to human users that have not interacted with robots so far. Hence, they are particularly well suited for this purpose. In this work, we present our anthropomorphic mobile communication robot Robotinho. It is equipped with an expressive communication head to display emotions. Its multimodal dialog system incorporates gestures, facial expression, body language, and speech. We describe the behaviors that we developed for interaction with inexperienced users in a museum tour guide scenario. In contrast to prior work, Robotinho communicated with the guided persons during navigation between exhibits, not only while explaining an exhibit. We report qualitative and quantitative results from evaluations of Robotinho in RoboCup@Home competitions and in a science museum.

2011

Abstract This paper gives a brief overview of the challenges for multi-model perception and generation applied to robot companions located in human social environments. It reviews the current position in both perception and generation and the immediate technical challenges and goes on to consider the extra issues raised by embodiment and social context. Finally, it briefly discusses the impact of systems that must function continually over months rather than just for a few hours.

2003

The development of robots capable of accepting instructions in terms of familiar concepts to the user is still a challenge. For these robots to emerge it's essential the development of natural language interfaces, since this is regarded as the only interface acceptable for a machine which expected to have a high level of interactivity with Man. Our group has been involved for several years in the development of a mobile intelligent robot, named Carl, designed having in mind such tasks as serving food in a reception or acting as a host in an organization. The approach that has been followed in the design of Carl is based on an explicit concern with the integration of the major dimensions of intelligence, namely Communication, Action, Reasoning and Learning. This paper focuses on the multi-modal human-robot language communication capabilities of Carl, since these have been significantly improved during the last year.

2018

With the recent developments in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, robots are increasingly being assigned tasks where they have to interact with their human host. One interesting task for the robot is to accompany a human to their destination, which can be a lecture hall in a university building, the gate at an airport or to a conference room. In this scope we present an indoor robot service system which will guide the human to their destination in a safe way through crowded areas. We will integrate a Kalman Filter with a motion model based on the social force model (SFM) presented by Helbing and Molar [4] to track humans about the robot. These forces model different aspects of motion behaviors such as the motivation of people to reach a goal, the repulsive effect of walls and other people as well as physical constraints. We present a method to learn the weights of the forces for each of the humans in the environment to be able to track them better. In addition, once...

2010

The ToBI robocup team has been newly founded in Jan 2009 in order to proceed existing long-term research in the development of robot companions for domestic environments towards new challenges in more standardized benchmarking procedures, like RoboCup@Home. The main features of the ToBI system are a flexibile Active Memory-based architecture that enables the fast integration of new processing modules and new system behaviors and the modeling of mixed-initiative strategies for multi-modal dialog. The overall goal is an out-of-the-box robot that is able to successfully interact with naïve users. In this paper we describe the technical basis on which the ToBI system is based and give some insights on previous evaluation experiences.

EFTA 2003. 2003 IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation. Proceedings (Cat. No.03TH8696), 2003

This paper describes the architecture and current capabilities of Carl, a prototype of an intelligent service robot, designed having in mind such tasks as serving food in a reception or acting as a host in an organization. The approach that has been followed in the design of Carl is based on an explicit concern with the integration of the major dimensions of intelligence, namely Communication, Action, Reasoning and Learning. The paper focuses on the multi-modal human-robot communication capabilities of Carl, since these have been significantly improved during the last year.

Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, 2013

The main goal of this article is to describe Bender, a general-purpose social robot with humanrobot interaction capabilities, and to report and analyze its applicability in three different natural environments: (i) home settings, (ii) school classrooms, and (iii) public places. Evaluation of the robot's performance is based on its ability to detect and identify humans in those settings, its ability to express emotions, and its ability to interact naturally with humans. The obtained results, although preliminary, indicate that the robot has great acceptance from expert and non-expert human users alike, and that it is able to interact successfully with humans using human-like interaction mechanisms, such as speech and visual cues (particularly facial information). It is remarkable that the robot even has the potential to teach children in a real classroom setting. Further experiments will be conducted in order to better assess the robot's potential.

International Journal of Applied Sciences and Smart Technologies, 2021

Since the boom in science and technology, humans have been trying to invent machines that could reduce their efforts in day to day activities. In this paper, we develop a personal assistant robot that could pick up objects and return it to the user. The robot is controlled using an android application in mobile phones. The robot can listen to user’s command and then respond in the best way possible. The user can command the robot to move to given location, capture images and pick objects. The robot is equipped with ultrasonic sensor and web camera that helps it to move to different location effectively. It is also equipped with sleds that play important role in object picking process. The robot uses a tiny YOLOv3 model which is rigorously trained on several images of the object. There are some possible improvements that can be achieved which could help this robot to be used in several other fields as well.