Natural interaction with a robotic head

Abstract

Social robots are receiving much interest in the robotics community. The most important goal for such robots lies in their interaction capabilities. This work describes the robotic head CASIMIRO, designed and built with the aim of achieving interactions as natural as possible. CASIMIRO is a robot face with 11 degrees of freedom. Currently, the robot has audio-visual attention (based on omnidirectional vision and sound localization abilities), face detection, head gesture recognition, owner detection, etc. The results of interviews with people that interacted with the robot support the idea that the robot has relatively natural communication abilities, although certain aspects should be further developed.