Towards an Integrated Robotic System for Interactive Learning in a Social Context

One ambitious goal in current robotics research is to build robots that can interact with humans in an intuitive way and can do so outside the lab in real world situations and environments such as private homes or public places. Toy robots like, e.g., Sony´s AIBO are already being sold successfully for entertainment purposes, but they usually lack sophisticated human-like interaction capabilities preventing non-expert users to instruct them for useful tasks. We have developed a robot that is capable of processing multi-modal instructions and can, therefore, be instructed interactively in a social situation. This paper gives an overview of the components of the system and their integration. The system performance is described in detail based on observations from human-robot interactions and processing times to identify critical system components and further research directions. Finally, we report on first human-robot interactions with our robot BIRON (Bielefeld Robot companiON) being situated in a real home environment. These interactions demonstrate that our robot is able to interact with users in a real home environment and can thus serve as a basis for comprehensive user studies focussing on embodied interaction for social learning