Service Robot SCORPIO with Robust Speech Interface

Abstract

The SCORPIO is a small-size mini-teleoperator mobile service robot for booby-trap disposal. It can be manually controlled by an operator through a portable briefcase remote control device using joystick, keyboard and buttons. In this paper, the speech interface is described. As an auxiliary function, the remote interface allows a human operator to concentrate sight and/or hands on other operation activities that are more important. The developed speech interface is based on HMM-based acoustic models trained using the SpeechDatE-SK database, a small-vocabulary language model based on fixed connected words, grammar, and the speech recognition setup adapted for low-resource devices. To improve the robustness of the speech interface in an outdoor environment, which is the working area of the SCORPIO service robot, a speech enhancement based on the spectral subtraction method, as well as a unique combination of an iterative approach and a modified LIMA framework, were researched, developed and tested on simulated and real outdoor recordings.