Development of a Cost-Effective Tele-Robot System Delivering Speaker’s Affirmative and Negative Intentions

Abstract

A telerobot offers a more engaging and enjoyable interaction with people at a distance by communicating via audio, video, expressive gestures, body pose and proxemics. To provide its potential benefits at a reasonable cost, this paper presents a telepresence robot system for video communication which can deliver speaker`s head motion through its display stanchion. Head gestures such as nodding and head-shaking can give crucial information during conversation. We also can assume a speaker`s eye-gaze, which is known as one of the key non-verbal signals for interaction, from his/her head pose. In order to develop an efficient head tracking method, a 3D cylinder-like head model is employed and the Harris corner detector is combined with the Lucas-Kanade optical flow that is known to be suitable for extracting 3D motion information of the model. Especially, a skin color-based face detection algorithm is proposed to achieve robust performance upon variant directions while maintaining reasonable computational cost. The performance of the proposed head tracking algorithm is verified through the experiments using BU`s standard data sets. A design of robot platform is also described as well as the design of supporting systems such as video transmission and robot control interfaces.