An interactive robot butler

Abstract

This paper describes a novel robotic butler, developed by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers. The robotic butler is capable of detecting and tracking human, recognize hand gestures, serving beverages and performs dialog conversation with guest about their interests and their preferences; and providing specific information on the facilities at Fusionopolis building and various technologies used by the robot. The robot employs an event driven dialogue management system (DMS) architecture, speech recognition, ultra wideband, vision understanding and radio frequency identification. All these components and agents that are integrated in the DMS architecture are modular and can be re-used by other applications. In this paper, we will first describe the design concept and the architecture of the robotic butler. Secondly, we will describe in detail the workings of the speech and vision technology as this paper mainly focuses on human-robot interaction aspects of the social robot. Lastly, this paper will highlight some key challenges that were faced during the implementation of speech and vision technology into the robot. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.