A socially-intelligent multi-robot service team for in-home monitoring

The objective of this study is to develop a socially-intelligent service team comprised of multiple robots with sophisticated sonic interaction capabilities that aims to transparently collaborate towards efficient and robust monitoring by close interaction. In the distributed scenario proposed in this study, the robots share any acoustic data extracted from the environment and act in-sync with the events occurring in their living environment in order to provide potential means for efficient monitoring and decision-making within a typical home enclosure. Although each robot acts as an individual recognizer using a novel emotionally-enriched word recognition system, the final decision is social in nature and is followed by all. Moreover, the social decision stage triggers actions that are algorithmically distributed among the robots´ population and enhances the overall approach with the potential advantages of the team work within specific communities through collaboration.