Auflistung nach Autor:in "Applewhite, Timothy"
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- PublikationA step towards automated room reservation with the NAO(Hochschule für Wirtschaft FHNW, 2019) Applewhite, Timothy; Zhong, Jia; Institute for Information Systems, HSW FHNW, BaselThe continuous development and rise of technology, specifically in the fields of robotics and chatbots, has caught the attention of the Institute für Wirtschaftsinformatik (IWI). With being in possession of the NAO robot, the goal has been set to experiment with their capabilities, in particularly in combination with a chatbot. Therefore, the objective of this Bachelor thesis is to create a prototype, combining the two mentioned components via an intermediate server, developed in Python. Additionally, different chatbots should be evaluated in order to find the one best performing when used within the prototype and thus with the NAO.11 - Studentische Arbeit
- PublikationMultimodal Human-Robot Interaction Combining Speech, Facial Expressions, and Eye Gaze(Hochschule für Wirtschaft FHNW, 2021) Applewhite, Timothy; Dornberger, Rolf; Zhong, JiaHuman-Robot Interaction (HRI) is being applied more and more frequently in different areas with the continuous uprise of technology. While initially, dialogue systems only involved recognizing a spoken or text input, the shift has changed towards multimodal dialogue systems. In essence, this implies that multiple input channels are retrieved, such as apart from the verbal input, also various nonverbal channels such as the human’s facial expression. The artifact developed during this Master thesis consists of a multimodal dialogue system involving Pepper, a humanoid robot developed by SoftBank Robotics (n.d.-a) and input channels capturing the human’s speech, facial expression, and eye gaze. By establishing a modular architecture using network communication, the collected inputs are combined and sent to Rasa (2021), an open-source conversational agent running on an intermediate server. Upon Pepper receiving the response selected by Rasa, a body language animation is performed, and an emoji matching the social context is displayed on the attached tablet, while simultaneously speaking the response back to the interacting partner. The results of the evaluation phase propose that while speech and eye gaze recognition achieve high levels of accuracy, the facial expression recognition component cannot provide the same reliability. Apart from the facial expression recognition concept proposed by SoftBank Robotics (n.d.-g), two different approaches were defined by the author of this Master thesis and require further evaluation. The overall response times of the multimodal system are kept low with Rasa requiring the majority of the time to select the appropriate response.11 - Studentische Arbeit
- PublikationNovel bidirectional multimodal system for affective human-robot engagement(IEEE, 2021) Applewhite, Timothy; Zhong, Jia; Dornberger, Rolf [in: 2021 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) Proceedings]Multimodal interaction is an essential prerequisite for affective human-robot engagement. Research on bidirectional, affective multimodal interaction systems investigates systems that recognize a user's affect and generate emotional response based on this user's affect. The presented work investigates a novel bidirectional, affective multimodal interaction system using a social robot and an open-source dialogue system framework, developing a prototype based here on Pepper and Rasa. Compared to special lab robotics systems, the proposed system is more attainable, while incorporating, alongside speech and facial expression, eye gaze as one of the major features to convey emotions as input channels. The system generates and emulates emotional output behaviors based on a user's affect using speech, gestures and emojis. This paper describes the concrete implementation and evaluation of the proposed system. Results of the evaluation show that, although the recognition accuracy of the input channels perform differently well, the system can derive well-defined rule-based emotional output behaviors with a high multimodal accuracy rate in the given test scenarios.04B - Beitrag Konferenzschrift
- PublikationpowerGhosts & defensiveGhosts – Enhanced ghost team controller based on Ant Colony Optimization for Ms. Pac-Man(IEEE, 2021) Applewhite, Timothy; Kaufmann, Roger; Dornberger, Rolf; Hanne, Thomas [in: 2021 8th Intl. Conference on Soft Computing & Machine Intelligence (ISCMI 2021). November 26-27, 2021 Cairo, Egypt]This paper presents an improved controller based on Ant Colony Optimization for the ghost team of Ms. Pac-Man. The controller is an enhanced version of fairGhosts which is based on the ghostAnt framework. Various improvements were implemented in terms of parameters and concepts. Especially for the explorer ants, fairGhosts uses a simplified version, as the exact reasoning for the proposed concepts could not be determined in the ghostAnt framework. In this paper, two new types of ghost teams are proposed after the modifications were conducted: powerGhosts and defensiveGhosts. powerGhosts take into account the power pill aspect for stopping criteria and solution quality of the explorer ants, and defensiveGhosts additionally involve a threshold of Ms. Pac-Man’s distance to the nearest power pill for the hunter ants, so as not to be caught easily. Test results show that the powerGhosts version shows on average 15% better results than the initial fairGhosts setup, while defensiveGhosts performs equal or slightly worse than the initial implementation. It can be concluded that including the power pill aspect in the explorer ants concept shows an improved performance of the ghost team. On the other hand, the concept of distancing ghosts from Ms. Pac-Man when she is near a power pill did not result in any significant improvement.04B - Beitrag Konferenzschrift