A testbed platform for assessing human-robot verbal interaction

Verbal interaction provides a natural and social-style interaction mode by which robots can communicate with general public who is likely unknowledgeable in robotics. This interaction mechanism is also very important for a broad range of users such as hands/eyes-busy users, motor-impaired users, users with vision impairment and users working in hostile environments. This paper presents a testbed that can be used to study human-robot verbal interaction. The proposed testbed encompasses a Java-based user interfaces and a user-independent automatic speech recognizer with a modified grammar module in the context of human-robot interaction. The performance of the proposed testbed has been evaluated quantitatively using a set of evaluation metrics such as word correct rate, recognition Time and success and false action rates. The conducted experiments show the promising features of the system.