Towards a Natural Human-Robot Interaction in an Industrial Environment

Nowadays, modern industry has adopted robots as part of their processes. In many scenarios, such machines collaborate with humans to perform specific tasks in their same environment or simply guide them in a natural, safe and efficient way. Our approach improves a previously conducted work on a multi-modal human-robot interaction system with different audio acquisition and speech recognition modules for a more natural communication. The semantic interpreter, with the aid of a knowledge manager, parses the resulting transcription and, using contextual information, selects the order that the operator has uttered and sends it to the robot to be executed. This setup is evaluated in a real manufacture scenario in a laboratory environment with a large set of end users both quantitatively and qualitatively. The gathered results reveal that the system behaves robustly and that the assignment was also considered by the end users as manageable, whilst the system in overall was received with a high level of trust and usability.