Abstract
A home robot in the future should be able to be used in living environment with people. We have developed a high performance auditory function for a home robot to communicate with its user, and carry out orders from him/her. It is incorporated into a new robot based on the robotic-information-home appliance, "ApriAlpha^<TM>". This robot is equipped with 6 microphones and a new designed multimedia front-end processing board in order to support verbal orders from plural users. The omni-directional auditory function enables the robot to detect the directions of voices, and recognize each of contents to carry out them. After experiments through NEDO prototype robot exhibition at EXPO2005, reaction with sound detection of the robot was improved to start replying earlier and face detection using embedded camera was added to make it more useful.
