Construction of an Independent Natural-Language Human-Robot Interaction

As modern society grows older, it seems helpful to use service robots for certain supporting tasks. To interact with such a device, spoken natural language seems promising as most people can use it without difficulities. For that reason, a concept for interaction based on natural language gets developed in this work. This type of interaction gets enabled by the use of a voice assistant. But more and more often commercial voice assistants are raising concerns reagarding privacy. For that reason, using an Open-source system is the preffered method, as this type of voice assistants focusses on data protection. After examining different voice assistants, Mycroft AI has proven itself to fullfill the requirements resulting from the use cases, in particular protecting the privacy of the user. Based on these requirements, Mycroft was used to create a concept for the interaction and to implement a prototype. Afterwards the usability of the concept was rated by a study based on the prototype. The results of the study have shown, that interacting with a service robot by using natural language is possible, even when the user does not have knowledge about a possible command structure whilst creating a certain feeling of a natural interaction.