Abstract
We are developing a mobile robot that accepts directions given through a dialog. Spoken dialog is the most natural way of giving directions to the robot; however, it is difficult to deal with the directions containing demonstrative words when using only verbal information. To solve this problem, we propose a method that uses spoken dialog and pointing. There are two issues to realize pointing-based communication: how to recognize the user's pointing gesture, and how to make the robot point the coordinate. We used Kinect sensor for recognizing the gesture. For performing a pointing gesture, we used a robot avatar, a small robot mounted on a main robot. The robot avatar performs gestures instead of the main robot. This paper describes basic concept and hardware for moving a mobile robot to directions coordinates using pointing.
