A speech interface for a mobile robot

Abstract

Robotics is increasingly spanning every aspect of our lives, from domestic tasks to advanced military applications. Research has been carried out to integrate anthropomorphic characteristics to robots; to develop machines with human-like perception, hearing and the other classical human senses. Witnessing the potential of including humanoid robots in our everyday tasks, the benefits of using such technology are compelling to a great extent. This project addresses the challenges behind the design and implementation of speech recognition and speech synthesis in the context of humanrobot interaction, and demonstrates how natural language and natural interaction between the human and the robot have the potential to act as an effective and natural communications channel in our daily routines. Despite the widespread use of speech recognition technologies in applications such as mobile personal assistants, the integration of speech understanding and speech synthesis in human-robot interaction still exhibits shortcomings of not being as natural as a normal human to human interaction and conversation. A robust, speaker independent speech recognition engine, together with an intelligible speech synthesiser need to be designed, implemented and tested. This leads to the design and implementation of the communication framework between the speech recognition and speech synthesis modules and the mobile robot. A typical implementation is presented and evaluated with respect to the ability of using the system for speaker independent applications aimed at manoeuvring the robot in cluttered environments. One of the important goals of this project is to encompass natural language processing and natural human-robot interaction capabilities. Numerous studies and tests with an array of speakers, are described, so as to provide the data upon which the evaluations of the system performance are based. This report presents all the engineering design, implementation details, test results and findings that have been achieved throughout this project.