Voice Controlled Multi-robot System for Collaborative Task Achievement

This paper describes a framework for machine cooperation and interaction designed to promote collaborative work with humans in a natural and flexible manner. More specifically, we propose a system where all the interactions with the robots are achieved through voice using Alexa Voice Service (AVS). Besides the implementation of a voice interface channel, we develop a navigation module that enables a robot to autonomously navigate through a map to reach a specific destination while avoiding obstacles. We provide the system with the ability to choose and operate the appropriate robot in context of multi-robot cooperation for task achievement. In addition, a user can intervene during the process of executing a relatively complex task by interacting with the robots via voice commands. To validate the proposed framework, we conduct experiments to quantify the performance during cooperative action involving the human and the system.

[1]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[2]  Constantine D. Spyropoulos,et al.  HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION BASED ON SPOKEN NATURAL LANGUAGE DIALOGUE , 2001 .

[3]  Tiancheng Li,et al.  Monte Carlo localization for mobile robot using adaptive particle merging and splitting technique , 2010, The 2010 IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation.

[4]  Eric Bonabeau,et al.  Cooperative transport by ants and robots , 2000, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[5]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  On developing a voice-enabled interface for interactive tour-guide robots , 2003, Adv. Robotics.

[6]  Ashraf Odeh,et al.  Developing of Natural Language Interface to Robot - an Arabic Language Case Study , 2014 .

[7]  Christian Bettstetter,et al.  Collaboration in Multi-Robot Exploration: To Meet or not to Meet? , 2016, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[8]  Enrico Pagello,et al.  Advanced approaches for multi-robot coordination in logistic scenarios , 2017, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[9]  Gernot A. Fink,et al.  A multi-modal dialog system for a mobile robot , 2004, INTERSPEECH.

[10]  Zhi Yan,et al.  Multi-robot Decentralized Exploration using a Trade-based Approach , 2011, ICINCO.

[11]  Kurt Konolige,et al.  The Office Marathon: Robust navigation in an indoor office environment , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[12]  S. Mohan,et al.  A review of research in multi-robot systems , 2012, 2012 IEEE 7th International Conference on Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS).

[13]  Ryo Kurazume,et al.  Service robot system with an informationally structured environment , 2015, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[14]  Sungho Kim,et al.  The educational use of home robots for children , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..

[15]  Kaiyu Zheng,et al.  ROS Navigation Tuning Guide , 2017, Studies in Computational Intelligence.

[16]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Probabilistic robotics , 2002, CACM.

[17]  Ali Hamzeh,et al.  A PSO-based multi-robot cooperation method for target searching in unknown environments , 2016, Neurocomputing.

[18]  G. Whelan,et al.  Cooperative search and rescue with a team of mobile robots , 1997, 1997 8th International Conference on Advanced Robotics. Proceedings. ICAR'97.

[19]  Tim C. Lueth,et al.  Decentralized control of distributed intelligent robots and subsystems , 1994 .

[20]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Monte Carlo Localization: Efficient Position Estimation for Mobile Robots , 1999, AAAI/IAAI.

[21]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Improving Grid-based SLAM with Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filters by Adaptive Proposals and Selective Resampling , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[22]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Improved Techniques for Grid Mapping With Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filters , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[23]  Gamini Dissanayake,et al.  Convergence and Consistency Analysis for Extended Kalman Filter Based SLAM , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[24]  Stergios I. Roumeliotis,et al.  Distributed multirobot localization , 2002, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[25]  Gregory Dudek,et al.  Multi-robot collaboration for robust exploration , 2004, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

[26]  Rachid Alami,et al.  Multi-robot cooperation in the MARTHA project , 1998, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[27]  Nicolas Jouandeau,et al.  A Survey and Analysis of Multi-Robot Coordination , 2013 .