Speech Communication with Humanoids: How People React and How We Can Build the System

Abstract

Robots are expected to help increase the quality of our life. Robots are already widely used in industry to liberate humans from repetitive labour. In recent years, entertainment is getting more momentum as an application in which robots can be used to increase peoples quality of life (Moon, 2001)(Wada et al., 2002). We have been developing the robot TAIZO as a demonstrator of human health exercises. TAIZO encourages the human audience to engage in the health exercise by demonstrating (Matsusaka et al, 2009). When demonstrating, TAIZO, the robot and the human demonstrator will stand in front of the human audience and demonstrate together. For this to work, the human demonstrator has to control the robot while they themselves are demonstrating the exercise to the audience. A quick and easy method for controlling the robot is required. Furthermore, in human-robot collaborative demonstration, the method of communication used between the human and robot can be used to affect the audience. In this chapter, we will introduce the robot TAIZO, and it’s various functions. We also evaluated the effect of using voice commands compared to keypad input during the robot-human collaborative demonstration. In Section 2 we explain the social background behind the development of TAIZO. In Section 2.5 we will discuss about effects of using voice commands compared to key input in human-robot collaborative demonstration. In section 2.6 we present an overview of the system used in TAIZO. In Section 2.7 is the evaluation and discussion of the results from experiments in which weaĂĂmeasured the effect of using voice commands through simulated demonstrations. Finally, in Section 2.10 and Section 2.11 we will discuss about the benefits and problems of using humanoid robot to this application. In latter part of the chapter, we will discuss how to develop the communication function for the humanoid robot. Recently, “behavior-based” scriptingmethod is applied inmany practical robotic systems. The application presented by Brooks (1991) used hieratical structuremodel, the recent applications (Kaelbling, 1991) (Yartsev et al, 2005) uses state transition model (finite state automata) to model the situation of the system. The developer incrementally develop the script by adding each behaviors which fits to each small situations. Diverse situation understanding ability can be realized as a result of long-term incremental development. The behavior-based scripting method can also be applied to communication robots by incorporating speech input with the situation model. Application of the behavior-based Speech Communication with Humanoids: How People React and How We Can Build the System