Novel multimodal communication skills implementation on the NI-9631 robot

The uninterruptible trend of developing high performance human-robot communication systems worldwide stimulates the research efforts focused to engine novel hardware configurations suitable for high performance multimodal communication abilities implementation. Being fully integrated in this major trend, the paper presents a specially conceived robotic configuration designed for human gestures and speech recognition abilities enhancement. Having the standard configuration of the NI SbRIO-9631 prototype robot, a novel multimodal communication structure has been developed by gradually extending this mobile device with voice recognition and real-time image processing units. The result is very flexible and powerful development tool for human-robot multimodal communication research and implementation. The hardware resources of this robot are wisely integrated then by using the LabView graphical software toolkit, enabling a large amount of voice signals and image processing algorithms testing. The designed software drivers also allow various sensor modality including vision and speech signals analyzing. Endowed with these novel capabilities, the mobile robot displays intelligence and cooperativeness in its behavior, and becomes a versatile hardware system for human-robot multimodal communication implementation.