Speech for Robotics

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a 1.5-day workshop at the University of Maryland that brings together engineers and scientists from academia and industry with expertise in speech processing, natural language processing and robotics to focus on the critical role that speech science should play in developing future embodied robotic technologies that can communicate effectively with humans of any demographics and in any environment. The result of the workshop will be a report containing well-motivated interdisciplinary research opportunities to promote the development of social robot applications that are beneficial to society. Solving the problem of spoken language processing for human to robot interaction will help in allowing a broad application of social robots including working with and alongside people in homes, schools, hospitals and workplaces. The first day of the workshop will include several parallel breakout groups that look at a variety of topics including the applications for social robots, what lessons we can learn from conversational agents, improving the spoken language communication of robots, shared resources and tasks across researchers, training of students, and collaboration between researchers in academia and those in industry. The second day will include all participants in a discussion of the results from the breakout sessions and the documentation of opportunities to move the field forward during the next 5 to 10 years. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.