INDIGO – “Interaction with Personality and Dialogue Enabled Robots”

Period: February 2007 - July 2009 Type: European Research Status: Completed

Overview

INDIGO aims to develop human-robot communication technology for intelligent mobile robots that operate and serve tasks in populated environments. In doing so, the project will involve technologies from various sectors, and will attempt to introduce advances in respective areas, i.e. natural language interaction, autonomous navigation, visual perception, dialogue systems, and virtual emotions. The project will address human-robot communication from two sides: by enabling robots to correctly perceive and understand natural human behaviour and by making them act in ways that are familiar to humans.

MIRALab’s contribution

MIRALab will contribute in realizing the expressive and emotional speech animation for the robot which requires the combination of several different modalities such as lip-synchronized speech, emotions, facial expressions and gaze. In order to achieve a high level of believability of the robotic face, an emotion and personality engine will be developed to control the parameters of robots emotional state which is required to establish a sense of individuality. In addition, a set of other face authoring tools and face engines will be developed to create a rich database of expressions/visemes and to produce automatic text-to-speech animation. What is more, MIRALab will be responsible for the management of multi-input for the face in order to ensure the believability of interaction.

Partners

MIRALab, University of Geneva
Switzerland
www.miralab.ch

Acapela Group
Belgium
www.acapela-group.com

Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg
Germany
www.uni-freiburg.de

Athens University of Economics and Business
Greece
www.aueb.gr

Foundation for Research & Technology – Hellas Institute of Computer Science
Greece
www.forth.gr

Foundation of the Hellenic World
Greece
www.fhw.gr

Hanson Robotics
U.S.
www.hansonrobotics.com

National Centre for Scientific Research (Demokritos)
Greece
www.iit.demokritos.gr/skel/

Neobotix / GPS
Germany
www.neobotix.de/en/

University of Edinburgh
United Kingdom
www.iccs.inf.ed.ac.uk