Audio-visual perception system for a humanoid robotic head.

One of the main issues within the field of social robotics is to endow robots with the ability to direct attention to people with whom they are interacting. Different approaches follow bio-inspired mechanisms, merging audio and visual cues to localize a person using multiple sensors. However, most of these fusion mechanisms have been used in fixed systems, such as those used in video-conference rooms, and thus, they may incur difficulties when constrained to the sensors with which a robot can be equipped. Besides, within the scope of interactive autonomous robots, there is a lack in terms of evaluating the benefits of audio-visual attention mechanisms, compared to only audio or visual approaches, in real scenarios. Most of the tests conducted have been within controlled environments, at short distances and/or with off-line performance measurements. With the goal of demonstrating the benefit of fusing sensory information with a Bayes inference for interactive robotics, this paper presents a system for localizing a person by processing visual and audio data. Moreover, the performance of this system is evaluated and compared via considering the technical limitations of unimodal systems. The experiments show the promise of the proposed approach for the proactive detection and tracking of speakers in a human-robot interactive framework.

A preliminary study of presence in virtual reality training simulation for medical emergencies.

In this paper, a preliminary study of presence in a training simulation for medical emergency based on virtual reality is presented. We explore the influence of interaction mechanisms, as well as the complexity of behaviours in the subjective sense of presence. As expected, it has been found that as the type of interaction is more natural, and the patient behaviour modelling is more complex, the achieved sense of presence is greater. However our results also show that the degree of presence depends more upon the complexity of patient modelling than on how natural the interaction is. Hence, we postulate that a proper patient modelling could elicit a high degree of presence, even with traditional interaction mechanisms.