Developing a service robot with communication abilities

A service robot designed to be of practical use in offices and commercial environments has been developed. The robot features 4-degree-of-freedom arms, grippers, a pan-tilt mechanism with eight cameras, and three microphones to recognize speech and the direction of a sound source. It moves itself around on wheels. The robot can be operated by, and communicates with, a natural voice that is synthesized using the prosody of a natural voice. The CPU, DSP, vision board, and local processors communicate with each other through an embedded LAN. This paper describes the hardware features, applications, communications, and self-charging capabilities that together realize the practicality of this robot.