Natural Communication and Interaction with Humanoid Robots

Abstract

In the personal or service robotics domain a very close interaction between humans and robots is crucial. To ad- vance research in this field we have designed and built the humanoid robot HERMES. It is shaped according to an anthropomorphic model and is equipped with two arms, a bendable body, a pan-tilt head with two video cameras and an omnidirectional wheelbase. It combines visual, kines- thetic and tactile sensing for enabling a natural communica- tion and interaction with humans. HERMES is capable of speaker-independent speech recognition and speech output. A special behavior-based system architecture is employed to integrate these key technologies. It is based on an under- standing of situations for the selection of the behaviors to be executed. Implementing this architecture allows almost natural human-like communication and interaction and makes the robot appear intelligent.