The robot voice-control system with interactive learning

Nowadays, robots are penetrating human lives and carry out many tasks that would have been impossible for machines just few decades ago. One can usually get an “end user” narrowor single-purpose robotic solution for a specific task with a user interface providing control within the scope of the given task. Another possibility is to get a more generalpurpose robot and design a custom control system for peculiar tasks. The latter usually involves programming using the manufacturer's rudimentary robot movement interface and requires deeper knowledge of robotics, computer sense, control systems etc. Providing a general-purpose control system for general-purpose robots which wouldn't require most of the aforementioned knowledge poses a challenge. It would make robotics appealing to wider audience and possibly speed up development and application of robots. Such system needs to have some “learning” capabilities as well as a friendly user interface for task “teaching”. The goal of our work described in this capture is a PC-software-based interactive system for general-purpose robot voice-control. This paper describes the designed prototype, its structure and the dialogue strategy in particular. The interactive control of robots could be used in special situations, when a robot is working in dangerous areas and no programming beforehand is possible. It could also be used in a situation when supervised learning for robot’s later autonomous operation has to be done, without knowledge about the robot’s programming language. Generally, the robots are actuated by sets of control commands, sometimes by a manual control interface (such as touchpad or joystick). The operator has to know the control commands, syntax rules and other properties necessary for successful robot control. The proposed system tries to simplify this robot programming and make it more user-friendly and easy to use. The system offers commands like “move left” or “elevate arm” that are translated and sent into the corresponding device (robot).