End user communication with robot is usually provided by PC-based user interfaces, using common programming techniques, or by simple button based remote controls. While those methods are very suitable for highly constrained environments, where reprogramming of the robot need not to be continuous, these are undesirable for applications requiring the robot to work with laymen in their daily environment.
With the recent introduction to the market of affordable humanoids and toy robots, children as well as adults have started to spend a significant of their leisure time engaging with these creatures. Toy robots have to fulfill a very difficult task, that to entertain, and in some cases, that to educate.
Providing robots with capabilities for speech and vision, such that they mimic human everyday communication, is an open research issue. Efficient methods for such processing remain computationally expensive and, thus, can not be easily exploited on cost and size limited platforms. The rapid developments of multimedia applications for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) make these handheld devices an ideal low-cost platform to provide simple speech and vision based communication for a robot. PDA s is light and can, therefore, easily fit and small robot, without overburden the robot’s total weight. PDAs are easy to handle: they can be carried in one hand or in a pocket.
There is a growing interest in developing PDA applications to remotely control mobile robots. The recent work follows closely such a trend and investigates the use of PDA interfaces to provide easy means of directing and teaching humanoid robots.
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