Towards a Robust Interactive and Learning Social Robot

Pepper is a humanoid robot, specifically designed for social interaction, that has been deployed in a variety of public environments. A programmable version of Pepper is also available, enabling our focused research on perception and behavior robustness and capabilities of an interactive social robot. We address Pepper perception by integrating state-of-the-art vision and speech recognition systems and experimentally analyzing their effectiveness. As we recognize limitations of the individual perceptual modalities, we introduce a multi-modality approach to increase the robustness of human social interaction with the robot. We combine vision, gesture, speech, and input from an onboard tablet, a remote mobile phone, and external microphones. Our approach includes the proactive seeking of input from a different modality, adding robustness to the failures of the separate components. We also introduce a learning algorithm to improve communication capabilities over time, updating speech recognition through social interactions. Finally, we realize the rich robot body-sensory data and introduce both a nearest-neighbor and a deep learning approach to enable Pepper to classify and speak up a variety of its own body motions. We view the contributions of our work to be relevant both to Pepper specifically and to other general social robots.