Happy patrons make better tippers: creating a robot waiter using Perseus and the Animate Agent architecture

As autonomous robots become increasingly adept at performing simple tasks like moving from place to place and picking up and delivering objects, it is becoming apparent that an important area of robotic research is that of developing natural interfaces for controlling them. In the context of building a robot "waiter", the authors demonstrate the use of the Perseus architecture for gesture recognition, teamed with the Animate Agent architecture for tightly coupled perception and action. Of particular significance is the ease of implementing this task utilizing the architectures and routines they have already created for other tasks.