Symbolic cognitive abilities implementation on the NI-9631 pervasive mobile robot

As it is well known, the uninterruptible trend of endowing robotic systems with more human-like intelligence represents a great scientific challenge and a major task of cognitive robotics. With the main goal of improving human-robot interaction, nowadays the great majority of human-robot communication behaviors are implemented on mobile agents, or so called pervasive mobile robots enhanced with complex interaction abilities. However, to choose the adequate hardware and software technologies in order to achieve rapid and efficient advancement in human-computer interactions implementation it looks a difficult and burdening task even for the specialists involved in the topic. Starting from the above observation, the main goal of this paper is to unfold a well-fitted example of mixing last generation hardware resources and software toolkits to implement complex human-like abilities on robotic systems. Besides outlining the advantages and versatility of the chosen technologies the paper also presents research efforts and experimental results regarding symbolic cognitive abilities implementation on a specially developed NI-9631 prototype robot structure. The hardware architecture of this mobile agent has been developed upon a unique robotic configuration designed for human gestures and speech recognition abilities implementation. By using the LabView graphical programming software technology, these modules integrates through specific software drivers various sensor modality including vision and speech signals analyzing. The robot upgraded with the above mentioned capabilities becomes a very flexible and powerful development toolkit for complex human-robot interaction research and highlevel cognitive abilities implementation. In addition, the system also represents a useful platform for a large amount of voice signals and image processing algorithms rapid testing and development, through that the robot displays intelligence and cooperativeness in its behavior.