An Autonomous Humanoid Robot Designed to Assist a Human with a Gesture Recognition System

This paper presents the design of an autonomous humanoid robot designed to optimize and enrich customer service in showrooms, e.g., electronic equipment, mobile network operators, and generally in stores with various articles. The proposed humanoid robot design is distinguished by two key components: a sensor-equipped mobile platform with drives and a body featuring a head outfitted with a touch tablet and an RGBD camera. The control system enables autonomous navigation in both known and uncharted environments, with a special focus on diverse, crowded, and cluttered spaces. To enhance its adaptability, this robot is not only fitted with LIDAR sensors but also cliff and ultrasonic sensors. While the interactive ability with humans is an expected functionality, this paper brings forth certain distinct innovations in humanoid robot design for customer service. One of these unique aspects includes the robot's ability to physically alter its configuration, such as rotating its head and adjusting the height of its torso to maintain line-of-sight with the customer. This capability signifies a novel degree of spatial responsiveness that exceeds static interaction. Moreover, the proposed robot is equipped with a user-friendly gesture recognition system, uniquely designed to detect and recognize simple human hand gestures. This attribute paves the way for understanding simple commands such as requests for assistance. Upon recognizing a request, the robot tailors its services by following the person around the showroom, effectively assisting and answering customer queries or displaying requisite information on its screen. This active assistance model, specifically tailored for human interaction, showcases the robot's unique capability to respond proactively and dynamically to human inputs.