Humanoids expected to collaborate with people should be able to interact with them in the most natural way. This involves significant perceptual, communication, and motor processes, operating in a coordinated fashion. Consider a social gathering scenario where a humanoid is expected to possess certain social skills. It should be able to explore a populated space, to localize people and to determine their status, to decide to join one or two persons, to synthetize appropriate behavior, and to engage in dialog with them. Humans appear to solve these tasks routinely by integrating the often complementary information provided by multi sensory data processing, from low-level 3D object positioning to high-level gesture recognition and dialog handling. Understanding the world from unrestricted sensorial data, recognizing people's intentions and behaving like them are extremely challenging problems. The objective of HUMAVIPS is to endow humanoid robots with audiovisual (AV) abilities: exploration, recognition, and interaction, such that they exhibit adequate behavior when dealing with a group of people. Proposed research and technological developments will emphasize the role played by multimodal perception within principled models of human-robot interaction and of humanoid behavior. An adequate architecture will implement auditory and visual skills onto a fully programmable humanoid robot. An open-source software platform will be developed to foster dissemination and to ensure exploitation beyond the lifetime of the project.
