Cognitive recognition and the homemate robot

Abstract

This talk introduces “HomeMate,” a cognitive consumer robot targeted for serving the elderly with such services as errands, medicine delivery and video chatting in a home environment. HomeMate features, in particular, cognitive recognition for interacting with humans as well as for searching for target objects to be delivered. The cognitive recognition developed for HomeMate is intended for achieving human-like dependability in interaction and recognition based on a series of self-generated cognitive behaviors. They include the selection of features optimal for the given visual environment, the proactive collection of evidences for reducing uncertainties and ambiguities in recognition, the probabilistic fusion of evidences for reaching a high confidence of decisions, the incorporation of context into probabilistic information fusion, the interactive conversation with humans for verifying facts or receiving assistance, etc. The details of implementation and experimentation of HomeMate will be presented with the demonstration of the power of cognitive recognition toward opening consumer market applications.