Research Towards Socially Interactive Robots

This work includes research work performed during Ph. D studies of the author. The work includes four main parts. The first part presents former work about the concept of uncanny valley and the work performed by the author in this regard. Findings suggest that the concept of uncanny valley is not supported by the experiments. The second part of the work presents a new approach to build grammar for speech recognition using both Command and Control Grammar and Dictation Grammar for an interactive robot. The third part presents interaction through speech along with recognition of emotion from speech through linguo-acoustic classification of speech in which emotions of human user are recognized from acoustic contents of speech supported by linguistics. Finally in the fourth part the interactive robot is proposed to be used as a friendly instructor to native Chinese children to teach English.