Voice Activation and Control to Improve Human Robot Interactions with IoT Perspectives

Digital Voice Assistants are an emerging technology due to improvements on mobile communication and computing technologies. They became more popular in recent years, since marketing strategies on intelligent/smart-home devices. Home robotics are widespread their existence in the society to assist humans in various tasks. Majority of the applications on smart environments are relying on Internet of Things (IoT) devices that closely related with voice activation and control, which can be considered as a foundation of assistive and home robotics. Human-robot interaction is very important exercise in all robotic applications from home robotics to highly dangerous life threatening work environments that are on the focus of assistive robotics sector. Smart home assistants are relying on the base of processing verbal requests by looking for key words in the conversation, Amazon Echo and Google Home are the most well-known examples. These key words triggers the predefined skills, a computer program controlling this intelligent system, to fulfill the users requests. A simple structure of the process works both directions, between the user and the device by providing a verbal request and receiving a verbal feedback from the device. In this study, we built and tested a system, a humanoid robot torso deployed with an IoT device, to control and simulate the process of assistive robotic workload. We tried to improve the effects of human robot interactions to close the loop using an interactive functioning for grading its effectiveness.