Abstract: A persistent companion robot supports both one-on-one interaction with a human and group interaction with more than one human. The interaction can be directed to a human in detectable proximity, such as a human that is near to the robot, one that is further away from the robot, or any combination of near and far humans. The interaction incorporates multi-modal human input detection (e.g., seeing, hearing, tactile) with multi-modal expression (e.g., movement, speech, non-speech sound, lighting, electronic imagery, and the like.

Abstract: Tiled grammar-based phrase spotting includes orienting at least one segment of a multi-segment robot to facilitate capturing speech of a user arriving at the robot, and configuring a plurality of processing threads of a multi-threaded processing environment into distinct tiles, wherein at least a portion of the plurality of processing threads operate simultaneously on the captured speech to recognize a phrase type using a speech recognition grammar that is associated with the corresponding tile, wherein at least two of the tiles employ different speech recognition grammars to recognize different content in the captured speech.