Interacting with a mobile robot: Evaluating gestural object references

Creating robots able to interact and cooperate with humans in household environments and everyday life is an emerging topic. Our goal is to facilitate a human-like and intuitive interaction with such robots. Besides verbal interaction, gestures are a fundamental aspect in human-human interaction. One typical usage of interactive gestures is referencing of objects. This paper describes a novel integrated vision system combining different algorithms for pose tracking, gesture detection, and object attention in order to enable a mobile robot to resolve gesture-based object references. Results from the evaluation of the individual algorithms as well as the overall system are presented. A total of 20 minutes of video data collected from four subjects performing almost 500 gestures are evaluated to demonstrate the current performance of the approach as well as the overall success rate of gestural object references. This demonstrates that our integrated vision system can serve as the gestural front end that enables an interactive mobile robot to engage in multimodal human-robot interaction.