BIRON - The Bielefeld Robot Companion

Abstract

In the recent past, service robots that are able to interact with humans in a natural way have become increasingly popular. A special kind of service robots that are designed for personal use at home are the so-called robot companions. They are expected to communicate with non-expert users in natural and intuitive way. For such natural interactions with humans the robot has to detect communication partners and focus its attention on them. Moreover, the companion has to be able to understand speech and gestures of a user and to carry out dialogs in order to get instructed, i.e., introduced to its environment. We address these problems by presenting the current state of our mobile robot BIRON, the Bielefeld Robot Companion.