On the gap between domestic robotic applications and computational intelligence

Aspired to build intelligent agents that can assist humans in daily life, researchers and engineers, both from academia and industry, have kept advancing the state-of-the-art in domestic robotics. With the rapid advancement of both hardware (e.g., high performance computing, smaller and cheaper sensors) and software (e.g., deep learning techniques and computational intelligence technologies), robotic products have become available to ordinary household users. For instance, domestic robots have assisted humans in various daily life scenarios to provide: (1) physical assistance such as floor vacuuming; (2) social assistance such as chatting; and (3) education and cognitive assistance such as offering partnerships. Crucial to the success of domestic robots is their ability to understand and carry out designated tasks from human users via natural and intuitive human-like interactions, because ordinary users usually have no expertise in robotics. To investigate whether and to what extent existing domestic robots can participate in intuitive and natural interactions, we survey existing domestic robots in terms of their interaction ability, and discuss the state-of-the-art research on multi-modal human–machine interaction from various domains, including natural language processing and multi-modal dialogue systems. We relate domestic robot application scenarios with state-of-the-art computational techniques of human–machine interaction, and discuss promising future directions towards building more reliable, capable and human-like domestic robots.