A few days of a robot's life in the human's world : toward incremental individual recognition

This thesis presents an integrated framework and implementation for Mertz, an expressive robotic creature for exploring the task of face recognition through natural interaction in an incremental and unsupervised fashion. The goal of this thesis is to advance toward a framework which would allow robots to incrementally "get to know" a set of familiar individuals in a natural and extendable way. This thesis is motivated by the increasingly popular goal of integrating robots in the home. In order to be effective in human-centric tasks, the robots must be able to not only recognize each family member, but also to learn about the roles of various people in the household. In this thesis, we focus on two particular limitations of the current technology. Firstly, most of face recognition research concentrate on the supervised classification problem. Currently, one of the biggest problems in face recognition is how to generalize the system to be able to recognize new test data that vary from the training data. Thus, until this problem is solved completely, the existing supervised approaches may require multiple manual introduction and labelling sessions to include training data with enough variations. Secondly, there is typically a large gap between research prototypes and commercial products, largely due to lack of robustness and scalability to different environmental settings.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Aryananda, Lijin, 1975-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rodney Brooks.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40495

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40495