Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction from the Perspective of a Speech Scientist

Abstract

Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) is a research area that developed steadily during the last years. While robots in the last decades of the 20th century have been mostly constructed to work autonomously, the rise of service robots during the last 20 years has mostly contributed to the development of effective communication methods between human users and robots. This development has been even accelerated with the advancement of humanoid robots, where the demand for effective human-robot-interaction is even more obvious. It is also amazing to note that, inspired by the success of HRI in the area of service and humanoid robotics, human-robot-interfaces become nowadays even attractive for areas, where HRI has never played a major role before, especially for industrial robots or robots in outdoor environments. Compared to classical human-computer-interaction (HCI), one can say that the basic interaction algorithms are not that much different in HRI, e.g. a speech or gesture recognizer would not work much differently in both domains. The major differences between HCI and HRI are more in the different utilization of modalities, which also depends very much on the type of employed robot. Therefore, the primary goal of this paper is the description of the major differences between HCI and HRI and the presentation of the most important modalities used in HRI and how they affect the interaction depending on the various types of available robot platforms.