A novel multimodal communication framework using robot partner for aging population
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2015
Abstract
In developed country such as Japan, aging has become a serious issue, as there is a disproportionate increasing of elderly population who are no longer able to look after themselves. In order to tackle this issue, we introduce human-friendly robot partner to support the elderly people in their daily life. However, to realize this, it is essential for the robot partner to be able to have a natural communication with the human. This paper proposes a new communication framework between the human and robot partner based on relevance theory as the basis knowledge. The relevance theory is implemented to build mutual cognitive environment between the human and the robot partner, namely as the informationally structured space (ISS). Inside the ISS, robot partner employs both verbal as well as non-verbal communication to understand human. For the verbal communication, Rasmussen's behavior model is implemented as the basis for the conversational system. While for the non-verbal communication, environmental and human state data along with gesture recognition are utilized. These data are used as the perceptual input to compute the robot partner's emotion. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of our proposed communication framework in establishing natural communication between the human and the robot partner.
Keywords
Human–robot interaction, Robot partner, Intelligent robot, Aging, Gesture recognition
Divisions
ai
Funders
MEXT Regional Innovation Strategy Support Program: Greater Tokyo Smart QOL (Quality of Life) Technology Development Region,The Hitachi Research Fellowship, from The Hitachi Scholarship Foundation, Japan,High Impact MoE Grant UM.C/625/1/HIR/MoE/FCSIT/08, H-22001-00-B00008 from the Ministry of Education Malaysia
Publication Title
Expert Systems with Applications
Volume
42
Issue
9
Publisher
Elsevier