Design and Development of an Interactive Service Robot as a Conversational Companion for Elderly People

Introduction of service robots has become a very promising development in addressing problems faced by elderly population in the world. This paper proposes a robot conversational companion capable of voice interacting with elders in human-like dialogues, during service assistance. A system consisting of a finite state interaction module and a regular expression based language identification method have been introduced for facilitating this task. A knowledge database containing language, user and object specific data has been designed, implemented and connected with the above system to enable more meaningful and natural dialogue creation. State transition diagram and event flow diagrams explaining the functionality of the system are presented. The proposed system has been implemented on a robot named Moratuwa Intelligent Robot (MIRob). The performance of the proposed system has been evaluated through a user study. Experimental results including a selected segment of a conversation are presented with an analysis. The evaluation results have indicated a high user satisfaction rate validating the robots capability to interact in a human-friendly manner during service assistance.