A message from the ECHORD coordinator Alois Knoll

KOMPEYE - Enhancing the visual perception capabilities of Kompaï robot using parallel processing

Robots could be the perfect home employees as they can work without a break and without complaining. Unfortunately, current technology in autonomous robotics is still far away from this dream. Nevertheless, improving the level of perception of current robots will lead them to evolve towards higher levels of intelligence. Thus, in recent years, the academic research has achieved important advances in the field of computer vision that allow humans to interact with machines in a more natural way. Such advances include the detection of human figures, heads, faces, facial expressions, even with moving cameras, along with gesture detection and recognition. The gap between all these perceptive technologies on one side and their effective implementation into autonomous service robots aimed at looking after people on the other side, is to be narrowed by the KOMPEYE experiment. The experiment's goals are:

To detect human presence in order to guide the robot towards people for an optimal human-robot interaction.
To spot and recognise faces and facial expressions to allow the robot to analyse whether a person is in trouble or not.
To spot and recognise gestures of people who ask the robot for help.
To adapt the Kompaï robot from Robosoft in order to make it interact safely with subjects in uncontrolled environments, using synergistically enhanced computationally intensive vision capabilities, achieved in real time through GPUs.
To disseminate results of the experiment and facilitate the benchmarking of the results where needed.

The consortium consists with two different partners from two different countries: a leading SME in the field of robotics and an experienced research institution in computer vision and human-machine interaction. This could be one of the possible keys of success of the experiment.

In short, KOMPEYE can be considered an extraordinary experiment in robotics, closing the main gaps of technology with novel applications from remarkable and experienced researchers from different countries in Europe, resulting in a successful experiment within the 7FP ECHORD project, helping the Robosoft Company to improve greatly the capabilities of the Kompaï product.