Natural human-robot interaction using speech, head pose and gestures

In this paper we present our ongoing work in building technologies for natural multimodal human-robot interaction. We present our systems for spontaneous speech recognition, multimodal dialogue processing and visual perception of a user, which includes the recognition of pointing gestures as well as the recognition of a person´s head orientation. Each of the components is described in the paper and experimental results are presented. In order to demonstrate and measure the usefulness of such technologies for human-robot interaction, all components have been integrated on a mobile robot platform and have been used for real-time human-robot interaction in a kitchen scenario.