Mutual assistance between speech and vision for human-robot interface

This paper presents a user interface for a service robot that can bring the objects asked by the user. Speech-based interface is appropriate for this application, but it alone is not sufficient. The system needs a vision-based interface to recognize gestures as well. Moreover, it needs vision capabilities to obtain the real world information about the objects mentioned in the user´s speech. For example, the robot needs to find the target object ordered by speech to carry out the task. This can be considered as a vision assisted speech. However, vision sometimes fails to detect the objects. Moreover, there are objects for which vision cannot be expected to work well. In these cases, the robot tells the current status to the user so that he/she can give advice by speech to the robot. This can be considered as a speech assisted vision through the user. This paper presents how the mutual assistance between speech and vision works and demonstrates promising results through experiments.