MuMMER: Socially Intelligent Human-Robot Interaction in Public Spaces
This addresses the problem of enabling robots to interact socially and flexibly with people in real-world public environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing components within a comprehensive framework.
The MuMMER project developed a social robot system for natural interaction in public spaces like a shopping mall, integrating audio-visual sensing, social signal processing, and motion planning into a ROS framework and deploying it successfully in Finland.
In the EU-funded MuMMER project, we have developed a social robot designed to interact naturally and flexibly with users in public spaces such as a shopping mall. We present the latest version of the robot system developed during the project. This system encompasses audio-visual sensing, social signal processing, conversational interaction, perspective taking, geometric reasoning, and motion planning. It successfully combines all these components in an overarching framework using the Robot Operating System (ROS) and has been deployed to a shopping mall in Finland interacting with customers. In this paper, we describe the system components, their interplay, and the resulting robot behaviours and scenarios provided at the shopping mall.