The increasing presence of mobile robot emphasizesthe crucial need of robot interaction skills. In this paper, we introduce eight prosody-only utterances as nonverbal communication sounds representing various speech acts (greeting, farewell, gratitude, apology, warning, prohibition, indirect request, direct request) with two subjective evaluations: i) an audio evaluation test and ii) a video evaluation test. The results from the first study show that nearly all prosody-only utterances were correctly understood as intended speech act. A subset was selected for a second study, where the overall results showed a general tendency of understanding that the robot was requesting human to yield the navigation passage regardless of the actual intent. This paper aims to advance robots’ nonverbal sounds towards human language, highlighting prosody’s role in signaling request intent in human-robot interaction.
Prosody-only utterance for robot navigation
| Inyoung Kim |
| The 20th Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2025), Melbourne, Australia, 4-6 March, 2025 |
To make robots autonomous in real-world everyday spaces, they should be able to learn from their interactions within these spaces, how to best execute tasks specified by non-expert users in a safe and reliable way. To do so requires sequential decision-making skills that combine machine learning, adaptive planning and control in uncertain environments as well as solving hard combinatorial optimisation problems. Our research combines expertise in reinforcement learning, computer vision, robotic control, sim2real transfer, large multimodal foundation models and neural combinatorial optimisation to build AI-based architectures and algorithms to improve robot autonomy and robustness when completing everyday complex tasks in constantly changing environments.
The research we conduct on expressive visual representations is applicable to visual search, object detection, image classification and the automatic extraction of 3D human poses and shapes that can be used for human behavior understanding and prediction, human-robot interaction or even avatar animation. We also extract 3D information from images that can be used for intelligent robot navigation, augmented reality and the 3D reconstruction of objects, buildings or even entire cities.
Our work covers the spectrum from unsupervised to supervised approaches, and from very deep architectures to very compact ones. We’re excited about the promise of big data to bring big performance gains to our algorithms but also passionate about the challenge of working in data-scarce and low-power scenarios.
Furthermore, we believe that a modern computer vision system needs to be able to continuously adapt itself to its environment and to improve itself via lifelong learning. Our driving goal is to use our research to deliver embodied intelligence to our users in robotics, autonomous driving, via phone cameras and any other visual means to reach people wherever they may be.
This web site uses cookies for the site search, to display videos and for aggregate site analytics.
Learn more about these cookies in our privacy notice.
Cookie settings
You may choose which kind of cookies you allow when visiting this website. Click on "Save cookie settings" to apply your choice.
This content is currently blocked. To view the content please either 'Accept social media cookies' or 'Accept all cookies'.
For more information on cookies see our privacy notice.