Multimodal Conversational Interaction with a Humanoid Robot
Résumé
The paper presents a multimodal conversational interaction system for the Nao humanoid robot. The system was developed at the 8th International Summer Workshop on Multi- modal Interfaces, Metz, 2012. We implemented WikiTalk, an existing spoken dialogue system for open-domain conversations, on Nao. This greatly extended the robot's interaction capabilities by enabling Nao to talk about an unlimited range of topics. In addition to speech interaction, we developed a wide range of multimodal interactive behaviours by the robot, including face- tracking, nodding, communicative gesturing, proximity detection and tactile interrupts. We made video recordings of user interac- tions and used questionnaires to evaluate the system. We further extended the robot's capabilities by linking Nao with Kinect.