Assisted robot navigation based on speech recognition and synthesis

Interactive robots can help people with or without disabilities. In this sense, research has been made in order to help children with motor disabilities to explore the world around them, which is important for their cognitive development. However, most of these initiatives lack on natural and intuitive interfaces, or are prohibitively expensive to be adopted in a larger scale. This paper describes an experimental environment to use speech recognition and synthesis to improve human-robot interaction (HRI) with children. The proposed system main goal is to perform activities with physically disabled children, however it can be used with other children. Thus, robots that are attractive, small-sized and relatively low-cost are used to implement such environment. The system recognizes a set of simple speech commands, which allows human-assisted navigation.