Human Robot Interaction through Simple Expressions for Object Recognition

Abstract — Service robots need to be able to recognize and identify objects located within complex backgrounds. Since no single method may work in every situation, several methods need to be combined. However, there are several cases when autonomous recognition methods fail. We propose an interactive recognition method in these cases. To develop a natural Human Robot Interaction (HRI), it is necessary that the robot should unambiguously perceive the description of an object given by human. This paper reports on our experiment in which we examined the expressions humans use in describing ordinary objects. The results show that humans typically describe objects using one of multiple colors. The color is usually either that of the object background or that of the largest object portion. Based on these results, we describe our development of a robot vision system that can recognize objects when a user adopts simple expressions to describe the objects. This research suggests the importance of connecting ‘symbolic expressions’ with the ‘real world ’ in human-robot interaction. I