Grant: Special Research Opportunity Program - Project

In designing advanced robotic systems, the main challenge is to integrate in a working system all the necessary elements (from mechatronics to sensing, computing, deciding and interacting modalities) required on a mobile robot to fulfill a useful role in real-life settings. Such a design requires a broad set of underlying expertises, usually addressed separately in distinct research laboratories. A unique collaboration opportunity between the Univ. Sherbrooke and Indiana Univ. Bloomington, Arizona State Univ. and Stanford Univ. will make it possible to integrate contributions on robust natural language interaction, affective computing, goal languages, logic and planning and cognitive architecture into an advanced omnidirectional humanoid robotic platform made by the Canadian group. This platform will be capable of changing its height, do gestures and facial expressions, feel the ground through its locomotion components and interact with people and the world with two arms and grippers through force sensing using a new type of actuators. It will use a sound source localization, tracking and separation system as pre-processing for speech recognition and dialogue manage- ment, goal generation and affective evaluation from linguistic and non-linguistic cues. It will also be capable to plan what it must do in highly dynamic and changing conditions of the real world. Computational architectures coming from engineering and cognitive modeling perspectives will be validated using this experimental testbed in realistic operating conditions. The integrated result will be demonstrated at the International RoboCup@Home competition, focusing on real-world applications and human-machine interaction with autonomous robots assisting humans in everyday life. Three Canadian researchers will be funded in this project, training 3 Ph.D., 1 Master's, 3 undergraduate trainee and 1 research professional. This project will produce one of the most advanced autonomous and interactive mobile robot ever built, with groundbreaking results on human-robot interaction and intelligent architectures, making Canada take on a leadership role in new emerging fields of robotics with potential uses in robotic assistive and interactive technologies.