Bibliography | Kashif, Moin Uddin: Speech interface for human and robot collaboration. University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Master Thesis No. 116 (2018). 73 pages, english.
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Abstract | In the past, robots and machines were mostly designed to perform specific tasks without much human interaction needed. Nowadays with the advancements in technology, intelligent robots can be designed which can perform multiple tasks, interact with the surrounding environment, assist and give valuable suggestions to humans etc. so an efficient and natural mode of communication is required for this human-robot interaction. In this thesis, we proposed an architecture to develop a speech interface for human-robot interaction. The speech interface is used to give voice commands to the robot, PR2, in order to perform 5 tasks which are designed to test the performance of the speech interface. The tasks are sorting, shaping, stacking, building and balancing of 6 objects on table-top which are designed and ordered by the level of difficulty. First two tasks are comparatively easier as the user doesn't have to follow any order to finish them, next two tasks require to follow the order and in the last task, the stack of objects must be balanced in order to finish it. The speech interface receives voice commands from the user, convert them into text, maps to the corresponding command and send to the task manager to perform the operation. After that, it processes the received command, takes the appropriate decision based on the current status of the task and available actions and sends the command to the PR2 to perform the operation. Additionally, we have designed a feedback mechanism where PR2 sends back the feedback to the task manager which is delivered back to the speech manager so that it can be converted into an audio signal and play for the user. Furthermore, the system uses a TCP connection for the exchange of data and information between the speech manager and the task manager. The speech interface is also compared with other modalities such as text input and graphical user interface with the same tasks and we have also conducted user study to evaluate the system performance. The results show that the participants prefer speech interface as it feels more natural.
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