The Robot ALIAS as a Gaming Platform for Elderly Persons

Entertainment is an important aspect of social robots in an AAL context. Especially for elderly people, a robot can be the right platform for entertaining games. This paper describes the robotic platform ALIAS as a gaming platform. In the project ALIAS, a robot is equipped as a communication platform for elderly people. One aspect of the project is to provide cognitively stimulating games using a natural human-machine interface. Therefore, a computer game with multiple interaction channels is integrated on the robot ALIAS. The robot has a touchscreen with a graphical user interface where the game Tic-tac-toe can be played. Additionally, the game can also be controlled by speech commands, whereby a speech dialogue system is employed. In order to enrich the human-machine dialogue, the robot uses face detection to control its gaze behaviour and look at its conversational partner. This demonstration scenario can be seen as a first approach to evaluate a multimodal user interface using haptics and speech in conjunction with a cognitive dialogue system.