Minotaurus: A System for Affective Human–Robot Interaction in Smart Environments

A service robot should be able to detect and identify the user in order to personalize its services and guarantee security, it should recognize the user’s emotions to allow affective interaction, and it should be able to communicate easily with the user and understand given commands by recognizing speech and gestures. Our research is motivated, for example, by the emerging needs of elderly care, health care, safety, and logistics. We have developed a distributed system for affective human–robot interaction which combines all the basic sensory elements and can collaborate with a smart environment and obtain further knowledge from the Internet. The realized HRI robot, Minotaurus, runs in real time and is capable of interacting with human beings. Minotaurus forms a rather generic platform for experimenting with human–robot collaboration in different applications and environments.