Greek-language verbal and non-verbal interaction with a philosopher humanoid robot

Abstract

We envision a world where humanoid robots can be used as exciting museum guides, shopping mall robots, or interactive theatre actors, impersonating characters such as ancient philosophers who talk about their theories and lives with the public. Towards that goal, in this paper we present four basic applications regarding human-robot interaction. These applications can be considered as part of a robust dialogue system whose development is ongoing. All the implementations are applied on a humanoid robot named "Demokritos". Humanoid Demokritos has the ability of performing humanlike facial expressions and have verbal interaction in Greek with its interlocutor. Additionally a face recognition and tracking system has been established and an implementation which gives our robot the capability of recognizing and imitating the facial expression of the person interacting with it. All the applications are being described and analyzed in detail and we conclude by presenting some of our next goals and by proposing some interesting aspects related to human-robot interaction.