MOBSY: Integration of vision and dialogue in service robots

Abstract

MOBSY is a fully integrated autonomous mobile service robot system. It acts as an automatic dialogue based receptionist for visitors of our institute. MOBSY incorporates many techniques from different research areas into one working stand-alone system. Especially the computer vision and dialogue aspects are of main interest from the pattern recognition’s point of view. To summarize shortly, the involved techniques range from object classification over visual self-localization and recalibration to object tracking with multiple cameras. A dialogue component has to deal with speech recognition, understanding and answer generation. Further techniques needed are navigation, obstacle avoidance, and mechanisms to provide fault tolerant behavior. This contribution introduces our mobile system MOBSY. Among the main aspects vision and speech, we focus also on the integration aspect, both on the methodological and on the technical level. We describe the task and the involved techniques. Finally, we discuss the experiences that we gained with MOBSY during a live performance at the 25th anniversary of our institute. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.