This paper presents a design concept and a exemplary realization of a perception system for naturally interacting humanoid robots. Relevant non-verbal interaction capabilities are selected based on psychological research. These interaction capabilities are transferred into a multi-functional user model which is exemplary implemented for interactive game scenarios. Benefits of this perception system design in comparison to existing realizations are a modular perception concept and the possibility to transfer psychological inter-personal research directly into human-robot interaction scenarios.

The development of human-robot interaction sce-narios is a strongly situation-dependent as well as an extremely dynamic task. Humans interacting with the robot directly react on observed stimuli; changes in the environment are not avoid- able. Therefore it is impossible to test and verify interaction scenarios in real environments in a repeatable manner. In this paper, we propose a robot development framework that is able to simulate all required modules of the robot, its sensor system as well as its environment including persons. The simulation is able to represent all actuators of a humanoid robot like body, head and arm movements as well as facial expression. Besides the simulation of actuators all sensors are modeled directly in the framework. It is possible to integrate cameras, microphones, distance sensors, and RFI D tags and reader. These sensors provide the input for the robot control system based on the environmental situation including static elements like furniture and walls as well as movable objects like humans. The implementation of human movements is based on the H-Anim standard and a modeling tool which enables the user to record and integrate self-designed motions.

An audio system is one of the basic components of a humanoid robot designed for natural interaction.For many interaction purposes it is sufficient to use the sound detection and localization as attention system for the vision system.In this paper the audio perception module of the robot ROMAN is presented including the integration into the existing control structure and the localization algorithm using a microphone array with 6 microphones.The reduction of data into so called sector maps is presented and the interaction with the control architecture is shown.

Humanoid robots as assistance or educational robots is an important research topic in the field of robotics. Especially the communication of those robots with a human operator is a complex task since more than 60% of human communication is conducted non-verbally by using facial expressions and gestures. Although several humanoid robots have been designed it is unclear how a control architecture can be developed to realize a robot with the ability to interact with humans in a natural way. This paper therefore presents a behavior-based emotional control architecture for the humanoid robot head ROMAN. The architecture is based on 3 main parts: emotions, drives and actions which interact with each other to realize the human-like behavior of the robot. The communication with the environment is realized with the help of different sensors and actuators which will also be introduced in this paper.

This paper presents a robust Kalman-based localization for outdoor vehicles. Outdoor vehicles require a fault-tolerant system that can manage temporary unavailable sensor measurements. The sensor system of the vehicle consists of odometry, inertial measurement unit (IMU) and differential global positioning system (DGPS) receiver. The system allows full 3D localization including position, attitude and velocities. Final experiments showed the localization and navigation capabilities of the outdoor robot RAVON

For original paper see IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol.38, p.177-82 (1992). Liu and Blostein (1992) consider sequential tests with varying stopping bounds (NSPRT) for testing simple hypotheses on independent but nonstationary observations. They state a considerable generalization of the famous Wald-Wolfowitz theorem [1948] on the (simultaneous) minimization of the expected sample sizes for given error probabilities (Liu and Blostein, Theorem 27). Unfortunately, this statement fails to be true: 1) a simple counterexample may be constructed by choosing densities f/sub 01//spl ne/f/sub 1,1/ such that 0>