Fritz - A Humanoid Communication Robot

In this paper, we present the humanoid communication robot Fritz. Our robot communicates with people in an intuitive, multimodal way. Fritz uses speech, facial expressions, eye-gaze, and gestures to interact with people. Depending on the audio-visual input, our robot shifts its attention between different persons in order to involve them into the conversation. He performs human-like arm gestures during the conversation and also uses pointing gestures generated with eyes, head, and arms to direct the attention of its communication partners towards objects of interest. To express its emotional state, the robot generates facial expressions and adapts the speech synthesis. We discuss experiences made during two public demonstrations of our robot.