Pointing gestures are widely used in robot navigationapproaches nowadays. However, most approaches only use point-ing gestures, and these have two major limitations. Firstly, they need to recognize pointing gestures all the time, which leads to long processing time and significant system overheads. Secondly,the user's pointing direction may not be very accurate, so the robot may go to an undesired place. To relieve these limitations,we propose a voice-guided pointing robot navigation approach named VGPN, and implement its prototype on a wheeled robot,TurtleBot 2. VGPN recognizes a pointing gesture only if voice information is insufficient for navigation. VGPN also uses voice information as a supplementary channel to help determine the target position of the user's pointing gesture. In the evaluation,we compare VGPN to the pointing-only navigation approach. The results show that VGPN effectively reduces the processing timecost when pointing gesture is unnecessary, and improves the usersatisfaction with navigation accuracy.

中文翻译：

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VGPN：面向人类的语音导航指点机器人

指向手势在当今的机器人导航方法中被广泛使用。然而，大多数方法只使用指向手势，这有两个主要限制。首先，他们需要一直识别指向手势，这会导致较长的处理时间和大量的系统开销。其次，用户的指向可能不是很准确，所以机器人可能会去到不想要的地方。为了缓解这些限制，我们提出了一种名为 VGPN 的语音导航指点机器人导航方法，并在轮式机器人 TurtleBot 2 上实现了它的原型。VGPN 只有在语音信息不足以进行导航时才能识别指点手势。VGPN 还使用语音信息作为辅助通道，帮助确定用户指点手势的目标位置。在评估中，我们将 VGPN 与仅指向导航方法进行比较。结果表明，VGPN有效降低了不需要指向手势时的处理时间成本，提高了用户对导航精度的满意度。