Technological evaluation of gesture and speech interfaces for enabling dismounted soldier-robot dialogue

Ravi Kiran Kattoju; Daniel J. Barber; Julian Abich IV; Jonathan Harris

doi:10.1117/12.2223894

13 May 2016 Technological evaluation of gesture and speech interfaces for enabling dismounted soldier-robot dialogue

Ravi Kiran Kattoju, Daniel J. Barber, Julian Abich IV, Jonathan Harris

Proceedings Volume 9837, Unmanned Systems Technology XVIII; 98370N (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2223894
Event: SPIE Defense + Security, 2016, Baltimore, MD, United States

Abstract

With increasing necessity for intuitive Soldier-robot communication in military operations and advancements in interactive technologies, autonomous robots have transitioned from assistance tools to functional and operational teammates able to service an array of military operations. Despite improvements in gesture and speech recognition technologies, their effectiveness in supporting Soldier-robot communication is still uncertain. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the performance of gesture and speech interface technologies to facilitate Soldier-robot communication during a spatial-navigation task with an autonomous robot. Gesture and speech semantically based spatial-navigation commands leveraged existing lexicons for visual and verbal communication from the U.S Army field manual for visual signaling and a previously established Squad Level Vocabulary (SLV). Speech commands were recorded by a Lapel microphone and Microsoft Kinect, and classified by commercial off-the-shelf automatic speech recognition (ASR) software. Visual signals were captured and classified using a custom wireless gesture glove and software. Participants in the experiment commanded a robot to complete a simulated ISR mission in a scaled down urban scenario by delivering a sequence of gesture and speech commands, both individually and simultaneously, to the robot. Performance and reliability of gesture and speech hardware interfaces and recognition tools were analyzed and reported. Analysis of experimental results demonstrated the employed gesture technology has significant potential for enabling bidirectional Soldier-robot team dialogue based on the high classification accuracy and minimal training required to perform gesture commands.

Citation Download Citation

Ravi Kiran Kattoju, Daniel J. Barber, Julian Abich IV, and Jonathan Harris "Technological evaluation of gesture and speech interfaces for enabling dismounted soldier-robot dialogue", Proc. SPIE 9837, Unmanned Systems Technology XVIII, 98370N (13 May 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2223894

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