A Robotic Home Assistant with Memory Aid Functionality

• Published in: KI 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence Vol. 9904; pp. 102 - 115
• Main Authors: Wieser, Iris, Toprak, Sibel, Grenzing, Andreas, Hinz, Tobias, Auddy, Sayantan, Karaoğuz, Ethem Can, Chandran, Abhilash, Remmels, Melanie, El Shinawi, Ahmed, Josifovski, Josip, Vankadara, Leena Chennuru, Ul Wahab, Faiz, Bahnemiri, Alireza M., Sahu, Debasish, Heinrich, Stefan, Navarro-Guerrero, Nicolás, Strahl, Erik, Twiefel, Johannes, Wermter, Stefan
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2016; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Human-robot interaction; Memory service system; Natural language understanding; Object detection; Person detection; Robotic home assistant; Social robotics; Speech recognition
• ISBN: 3319460722; 9783319460727
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46073-4_8

We present the robotic system IRMA (Interactive Robotic Memory Aid) that assists humans in their search for misplaced belongings within a natural home-like environment. Our stand-alone system integrates state-of-the-art approaches in a novel manner to achieve a seamless and intuitive human-robot interaction. IRMA directs its gaze toward the speaker and understands the person’s verbal instructions independent of specific grammatical constructions. It determines the positions of relevant objects and navigates collision-free within the environment. In addition, IRMA produces natural language descriptions for the objects’ positions by using furniture as reference points. To evaluate IRMA’s usefulness, a user study with 20 participants has been conducted. IRMA achieves an overall user satisfaction score of 4.05 and a perceived accuracy rating of 4.15 on a scale from 1–5 with 5 being the best.