HUMAVIPS - Humanoids with auditory and visual abilities in populated spaces

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Starting Point for Research:
Humanoid robots expected to collaborate with people should be able to interact with them as naturally as possible. This involves significant perceptual, communication, and motor processes, operating in a coordinated fashion. Humans appear to solve these tasks routinely by integrating the often complementary information provided by different modalities like vision or hearing, from low-level 3D object positioning to high-level gesture recognition and dialog handling.

Challenges for Research:
Understanding the world from unrestricted sensory data, recognizing people's intentions and behaving appropriately are some of the most important challenges addressed by the research in the area of interactive intelligent systems done at Bielefeld University.

Research Objectives:
The objective of the HUMAVIPS EU FP7 research project is to endow humanoid robots with the necessary audiovisual abilities for exploration, recognition, and interaction, such that they exhibit adequate behavior when dealing with groups of people.

Research Development and Contributions:
The research and technological development emphasize the role played by multimodal perception within principled models of human-robot interaction and of humanoid behavior. To support the development of the aforementioned skills, a new head for Aldebaran's humanoid robot NAO featuring support for stereo vision and an improved software architecture are developed within the project. Contributions from researchers of Bielefeld University are novel methods for dialog management and engagement modeling as well as the development of an integrating architecture for the experimental robotics system.

HUMAVIPS Automatica Exhibit:
CoR-Lab displays recent results of integrating algorithms for audio-visual fusion, head pose estimation & tracking and person identification & categorization developed in the HUMAVIPS project.

Contact:
Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab), Bielefeld University
Dr.-Ing. Britta Wrede:
bwrede@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de

Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Wrede:
swrede@cor-lab.uni-bielefeld.de
www.cor-lab.de