Voice Controlled Robot Manipulator for Industrial Applications

This paper presents an autonomous robot for industrialapplication, controlled via voice commands given by its user. Speech recognition is seen as one of the most promising interfaces between humans and robots, since it is probably the most natural and intuitive way of communication between human. Despite this fact, voice is rarely utilized in industrial robots. Therefore, this paper presents an application where an industrial robot is taught and instructed through voice commands rather than learning from demonstration. In addition to voice, the manipulator was equipped with acquiring vision information from the surrounding, in order to identify objects that are to be manipulated. An experiment is conducted to evaluate the behavior of the integrated voice and vision systems in a simulated environment. Findings of the experiment are presented. Identified capabilities of the proposed system and possible improvements are discussed.