Citation: Shafkat Kibria, Speech Recognition for Robotic Control. M.Sc. Thesis, Umeå University, 2005.
URL: http://www8.cs.umu.se/education/examina/Rapporter/ShafkatKibria.pdf
Abstract: The term “robot” generally connotes some anthropomorphic (human-like) appearance [24]. Brooks [5] research coined some research issues for developing humanoid robot and one of the significant research issues is to develop machine that have human-like perception. What is human-like perception?-The five classical human sensors-vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste; by which they percept the surrounding world. The main goal of our project is to introduce “hearing” sensor and also the speech synthesis to the Mobile robot such that it is capable to interact with human through Spoken Natural Language (NL). Speech recognition (SR) is a prominent technology, which helps us to introduce “hearing” as well as Natural Language (NL) interface through Speech for the Human-Robot interaction. So the promise of anthropomorphic robot is starting to become a reality. We have chosen Mobile Robot, because this type of robot is getting popular as a service robot in the social context, where the main challenge is to interact with human. Two type of approach we have chosen for Voice User Interface (VUI) implementation-using a Hardware SR system and another one, using a Software SR system. We have followed Hybrid architecture for the general robotics design and communication with the SR system; also created the grammar for the speech, which is chosen for the robotic activities in his arena. The design and both implementation approaches are presented in this report. One of the important goals of our project is to introduce suitable user interface for novice user and our test plan is designed according to achieve our project goals; so we have also conducted a usability evaluation of our system through novice users. We have performed tests with simple and complex sentences for different types of robotics activities; and also analyzed the test result to find-out the problems and limitations. This report presents all the test results and the findings, which we have achieved through out the project.