Enhancing the NI-9631 mobile robot abilities with multimodal communication skills

As it is well known, multimodality is a very common task in the human-robot communication. Human conversation is also considered usually multimodal, and a great amount of research is done worldwide to engine novel robotic systems embedding more and more intelligence for human gestures or speech recognition abilities enhancement. This paper presents a hardware configuration developed for multimodal communication skills implementation on the NI SbRIO-9631 prototype robot. The standard hardware structure of this mobile device has been gradually extended with voice recognition and real-time image processing units. By using the LabView graphical software toolkit, these modules integrates through specific software drivers various sensor modality including vision and speech signals analyzing. The robot endowed with the mentioned capabilities becomes a very flexible and powerful development tool for human-robot multimodal communication research and implementation. In addition to this, is also suitable for a large amount of voice signals and image processing algorithms testing, through that the robot displays intelligence and cooperativeness in its behavior.