Robotic receptionist ASKA : a research platform for human-robot interaction

Intelligent robots will make a chance for us to use a computer in our daily life. We implemented a humanoid robot, ASKA, in our university reception desk for the computerized university guidance. This paper describes the hardware and software system of ASKA. ASKA can detect a user in front of the reception desk using a stereo camera system attached to the head, and recognize the user's question utterance. It can answer the question by its synthesized voice with hand gestures and head movements.