Speech-Based Communication for Human-Robot Collaboration: Evaluation Studies

The recent advances in speech-based interaction and natural language processing have revolutionized the field of human-robot communication by making robots interact with humans more naturally. While several social robots mainly focus on human-robot communication, it is essential to investigate how collaborative robots, whose primary function is to perform various specialized tasks, e.g., pick and place, which require precise robotic motions, can benefit from speech-based communication. This chapter discusses the recent advances in speech-based human-robot collaboration (HRC) in industrial and assistive collaborative robotic applications. Several frameworks are discussed that present computational methods on how a human’s natural speech commands can be translated into robot actions, and the evaluation of these methods in user studies with physical robots is discussed. Moreover, results from recent studies present the human perspective in speech-based HRC for collaborative cooking. This chapter concludes with the main challenges and future research directions in the field of speech-based communication for HRC.