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A Robotic Home Assistant with Memory Aid Functionality

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Abstract

We present the robotic system IRMA (Interactive Robotic Memory Aid) that assists humans in their search for misplaced belongings within a natural home-like environment. Our stand-alone system integrates state-of-the-art approaches in a novel manner to achieve a seamless and intuitive human-robot interaction. IRMA directs its gaze toward the speaker and understands the person’s verbal instructions independent of specific grammatical constructions. It determines the positions of relevant objects and navigates collision-free within the environment. In addition, IRMA produces natural language descriptions for the objects’ positions by using furniture as reference points. To evaluate IRMA’s usefulness, a user study with 20 participants has been conducted. IRMA achieves an overall user satisfaction score of 4.05 and a perceived accuracy rating of 4.15 on a scale from 1–5 with 5 being the best.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A video showing the robot’s performance is presented in the video session of the IEEE RO-MAN 2016 conference [29].

  2. 2.

    Our dataset is available at https://figshare.com/s/d949d3410df8db468f77 [30].

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge partial support from the German Research Foundation DFG under project CML (TRR 169), the European Union under project SECURE (No 642667), and the Hamburg Landesforschungsförderungsprojekt.

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Correspondence to Iris Wieser .

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Wieser, I. et al. (2016). A Robotic Home Assistant with Memory Aid Functionality. In: Friedrich, G., Helmert, M., Wotawa, F. (eds) KI 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9904. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46073-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46073-4_8

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