Demonstration of Hospital Receptionist Robot with Extended Hybrid Code Network to Select Responses and Gestures

摘要

Task-oriented dialogue system has a vital role in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). However, it has been developed based on conventional pipeline approach which has several drawbacks; expensive, time-consuming, and so on. Based on this approach, developers manually define a robot’s behaviour such as gestures and facial expressions on the corresponding dialogue states. Recently, end-to-end learning of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) is an attractive solution for the dialogue system. In this paper, we proposed a social robot system using end-to-end dialogue system in the context of hospital receptionist. We utilized Hybrid Code Network (HCN) as an end-to-end dialogue system and extended to select both response and gesture using RNN based gesture selector. We evaluate its performance with human users and compare the results with one of the conventional methods. Empirical result shows that the proposed method has benefits in terms of dialogue efficiency, which indicates how efficient users were in performing the given tasks with the help of the robot. Moreover, we achieved the same performance regarding the robot’s gesture with the proposed method compared to manually defined gestures.