Service Robot SCORPIO with Robust Speech Interface. (3rd January 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ondas, Stanislav; Juhar, Jozef; Pleva, Matus; Cizmar, Anton; Holcer, Roland
• Is Part Of: International journal of advanced robotic systems. Volume 10:Number 1(2013)
• Publication Date: 2013-01-03
• Subjects: Service Robot -- Automatic Speech Recognition -- Speech Enhancement -- Spectral Subtraction -- Human-Robot Interaction; Robotics -- Periodicals; Robotics; Periodicals; 629.892
• DOI: 10.5772/54934
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1729-8806

Abstract

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.