Multimodal People Engagement with iCub

In this paper we present an engagement system for the iCub robot that is able to arouse in human partners a sense of “co-presence” during human-robot interaction. This sensation is naturally triggered by simple reflexes of the robot, that speaks to the partners and gazes the current “active partner” (e.g. the talking partner) in interaction tasks. The active partner is perceived through a multimodal approach: a commercial rgb-d sensor is used to recognize the presence of humans in the environment, using both 3d information and sound source localization, while iCub’s cameras are used to perceive his face.

[1]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Robust Real-Time Face Detection , 2001, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[2]  Giulio Sandini,et al.  The iCub humanoid robot: an open platform for research in embodied cognition , 2008, PerMIS.

[3]  Thierry Dutoit,et al.  Generating Robot/Agent backchannels during a storytelling experiment , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Mel Slater,et al.  Presence in Shared Virtual Environments and Virtual Togetherness , 2000, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments.

[5]  Hiroshi G. Okuno,et al.  An open source software system for robot audition HARK and its evaluation , 2008, Humanoids 2008 - 8th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots.

[6]  Giulio Sandini,et al.  The iCub Platform: A Tool for Studying Intrinsically Motivated Learning , 2013, Intrinsically Motivated Learning in Natural and Artificial Systems.

[7]  Shanyang Zhao,et al.  Toward a Taxonomy of Copresence , 2003, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments.

[8]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Recognizing engagement in human-robot interaction , 2010, HRI 2010.

[9]  Hideki Asoh,et al.  Sound source localization and signal separation for office robot "JiJo-2" , 1999, Proceedings. 1999 IEEE/SICE/RSJ. International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems. MFI'99 (Cat. No.99TH8480).

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

[11]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Designing sociable robots , 2002 .

[12]  Giorgio Metta,et al.  YARP: Yet Another Robot Platform , 2006 .

[13]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2001.

[14]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Toward sociable robots , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..