Intuitive human-machine-interaction and implementation on a household robot companion

The increasing capabilities of experimental household robot platforms require more and more sophisticated methods of interaction. While there are many developments in all directions of Human-Machine-Interaction, the integration and combination of several modalities into one robot system require some effort. To ease the development of applications supporting several types of interaction, Fraunhofer IPA has developed a framework named "Go". Within this framework we have integrated different kinds of interaction methods into one robot platform "Care-O-bot 3", a mobile service robot for accomplishing daily tasks. This framework and its interaction methods are presented here. The work described in this paper was partially conducted within the EU Integrated Project COGNIRON ('The Cognitive Robot Companion' - www.cogniron.org) and funded by the European Commission Division FP6-IST Future and Emerging Technologies under Contract FP6-002020. This work was also partly funded as part of the research project DESIRE by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IME01A.