The Collaborative Research Centre 588 “Humanoid Robots – Learning and Cooperating Multimodal Robots” was established on July 1st, 2001 by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and will r un until June 30th 2012.
The goal of this interdisciplinary research project is the development of humanoid robots which resemble humans in their ways of acting in the world, of reasoning and of communicating about the world. Apart from the development of mechatronic components for humanoid robots, the research efforts span a wide range of disciplines such as learning from observation, multi-modal human-humanoid interaction, interpretation of human activities, as well as the execution of grasping and manipulating tasks in a human-centered environment.
Within the SFB, the Interactive Systems Labs support workpackage 1 which provides components for dialog processing and speech recognition. Within the dialog component multimodal input of the recognition components is interpreted in isolation as well as with respect to the context and information is requested. The dialog constitutes an interface through which the robot can learn interactively and acquire new knowledge. Among its main tasks is also the robust recognition of continuous speech given the special constraints of the demonstrator.
Currently we are integrating a speech based attention model. Using topic based semantic grounding the robot can incrementally and autonomously learn new speech indexed ways of reacting to given human-human and human-robot conversations. To improve the quality of this learning cycle research in the area of feature enhancement with digital phase-locked loops and particle filters is conducted aiming to provide better speech recognition quality at increasing microphone-speaker distance.
For further information: www.sfb588.uni-karlsruhe.de
