Service Robot SCORPIO with Robust Speech Interface Regular Paper

The SCORPIO is a small‐size mini‐teleoperator mobile service robot for booby‐trap disposal. It can be manually controlled by an operator through a portable briefcase remote control device using joystick, keyboard and buttons. In this paper, the speech interface is described. As an auxiliary function, the remote interface allows a human operator to concentrate sight and/or hands on other operation activities that are more important. The developed speech interface is based on HMM‐based acoustic models trained using the SpeechDatE‐SK database, a small‐vocabulary language model based on fixed connected words, grammar, and the speech recognition setup adapted for low‐resource devices. To improve the robustness of the speech interface in an outdoor environment, which is the working area of the SCORPIO service robot, a speech enhancement based on the spectral subtraction method, as well as a unique combination of an iterative approach and a modified LIMA framework, were researched, developed and tested on simulated and real outdoor recordings.