The Human-Robot Interaction API is a high level, domain specific API designed to make it easy to create human-robot interaction applications. It contains high level primitives for: controlling robot actions, subscribing to social communication and representing and querying perception data.
#1. What does the Human-Robot Interaction API do? Why should I use it? APIs for programming robots are typically low-level and have little correspondence to how a person would normally describe an interaction between person and robot. The Human-Robot Interaction API provides high level, domain specific primitives that make it easy to program human-robot interaction. It allows you to do things like...
Make a robot:
- speak
- gaze at a persons head
- smile, frown, open mouth...
- point at a perons torso
- wave at someone
- listen to speech
- any combination of any of the above, at the same time or one after the other
Find out:
- when a person is perceived by a robot?
- what did they say?
- who is closest to the robot?
- who is to the left of the robot?
- what entities the robot has perceived?
The Human-Robot Interaction API
#2. Tutorials The Human-Robot Interaction API provides a number of important classes you will use when programming human-robot interaction: Entity (with subclasses Robot and Person), World and Query. The Robot class provides primitives for controlling robot actions and subscribing to social communication. Action primitive’s communicate with vendor specific implementations via a standardised action interface. Person instances model the human body and are used to program interactions with people, e.g. look at a person’s left arm. The World class is a collection of entities perceived by the robot; populated by vendor specific perception algorithms. Lastly, the Query class provides a high level interface, similar to Microsoft’s LINQ to filter entities in the World.
#3. API Documentation
The following list contains tutorials that explain how to program human-robot interaction for a number of different robots, including:
The following links detail the steps needed to add support for a new robot or algorithm to hri api.