A name recognition based call-and-come service for home robots

In this paper, we propose and implement an efficient robot name registration and recognition system in order to provide a call-and-come service for home robots. The service is designed to enable a robot to come to a user when its name is called correctly by the user. Therefore, techniques such as voice detection, robust speech recognition and detection of the location of the use are required. For efficient robot name registration by voice, the proposed method first restricts the search space for name registration by using monophone-based acoustic models. Then, the registration of robot names is completed using triphone-based acoustic models in the restricted search space. In order to provide a reliable service, the parameters for the robot name verification are calculated to reduce the acceptance rate of false calls. In addition, acoustic models are adapted by using a distance speech database to improve the performance of distance speech recognition. Moreover, the location of the user is estimated by using a microphone array. The experimental results for the registration and recognition of robot names show that the average word error rate (WER) of speech recognition is 1.7% in home environments, which is an acceptable WER for a real call- and-come service.