Human-robot interaction based on cloud computing infrastructure for senior companion

This paper presents a human-robot interactive system for senior companion based on cloud computing infrastructure. The proposed senior companion robot system (SCRS) is designed based on cloud computing network. In the server side, two cloud services are proposed, 1) the web-based user remote management service (WURMS) for remote robot control; 2) the robotic multimodal interactive computation services (RMICS) for providing the human-robot operation interfaces including the speech/sound recognition, speaker identification, face identification, sound source estimation and text to speech (TTS). In the robot client side, the behavior model is designed to use WURMS and RMICS services. In the experiments, two robots called “Robert” and “Davinci” are designed to evaluate the SCRS's capability. With using only low-cost and low-power CPUs (Intel Atom N450), both of the two robots can still work wirelessly for real-time human-robot interaction. Finally, we design five senior companion scenarios, and the experimental average MOS (Mean Opinion Score) is 4.16.