We are happy to announce that the first Human-Robot Interaction text book is now available. You can pre-order the book or have a look at the free PDF version. The book is being published by Cambridge University Press.

We recently had the pleasure of presenting our recent publication on ROILA at the IEEE RO-MAN conference in Edinburgh.

Mubin, O., Henderson, J., and Bartneck, C. (2014). You Just do not Understand Me! Speech Recognition in Human Robot Interaction. In the Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). [PDF]

The publication describes an experimental study where we compared the recognition accuracy of ROILA against English across three different microphones (headset, desktop and microphone of the Nao robot) and for grammatically richer phrases. Our results showed that although ROILA was unable to outperform English but the microphone of the Nao robot was worse out of the three microphones and it was influenced by the head movement of the robot. Given below is a picture of the setup of our experiment.

This short TED presentation gives a nice introduction into constructed languages (ConLang). I agree that making a ConLang messy makes it more like natural languages, but that does not make it easier to learn. Creating an artificial mess is worse than the natural mess most spoken languages have. Simply because it was done with intend. There is no good reason why an artificial language, or constructed language, should be irregular.

We are looking for participants in the Western Sydney area to partake in a study with the NAO robot and ROILA. Details are in the ad below.

Seeking participants willing to spend time learning a novel artificial language designed to interact with robots. This is part of an honours project studying languages in human-robot interaction. For more information about the language being used, ROILA, see www.roila.org

The study will involve repeating various phrases to a robot in ROILA and English. You won’t have to learn ROILA fluently; you will be able to listen to pre-recorded phrases and repeat it. These will also be made available to you before the date of the study if you wish to review it beforehand.

Participation in this research is completely voluntary and you have the right to withdraw at any time, without pressure or penalty. This research is completely anonymous. Participants will be rewarded with a $ 20 iTunes gift card. The study will involve 3 visits to one of the participating campus (Bankstown or Kingswood.)

As the research involves languages, you need to have been born in Australia and you must be 18 years or above.

If you are interested in participating, please email Joshua at 17019428@student.uws.edu.au.

This research is being carried out by Joshua Henderson, Computer Science Honours Student.

Development versions of the Automated Installer and Java Library are currently available on GitHub. Please report any issues to Josh at 17019428@student.uws.edu.au. The automated installer and java library are designed to help make it easier to work with ROILA. They are still a work in progress, so there are some features that won’t work fully (especially in the library.) GitHub will be updated with improved copies in the coming months.

It will be changed shortly to update a bug with the downloading of the pre-compiled library. There are more planned features for this to come, so keep an eye out on GitHub.