Intuitive Multimodal Interaction for Domestic Service Robots

Domestic service tasks require three main skills from autonomous robots: robust navigation in indoor environments, flexible object manipulation, and intuitive communication with the users. In this paper, we present the communication skills of our anthropomorphic service and communication robots Dynamaid and Robotinho. Both robots are equipped with an intuitive multimodal communication system, including speech synthesis and recognition, gestures and facial expressions. We evaluate our systems in the RoboCup@Home league, where our team NimbRo@Home won the innovation award for innovative robot body design, empathic behaviors, and robot-robot cooperation in 2009.