Benchmarking speech understanding in service robotics

Speech understanding is a fundamental feature for many applications focused on human-robot interaction. Although many tech-niques and several services for speech recognition and natural language understanding have been developed in the last years, specific implemen-tation and validation on domestic service robots have not been per-formed. In this paper, we describe the implementation and the results of a functional benchmark for speech understanding in service robotics that has been developed and tested in the context of different robot competitions: RoboCup@Home, RoCKIn@Home and within the Euro-pean Robotics League on Service Robots. Different approaches used by the teams in the competitions are presented and the evaluation results obtained in the competitions are discussed.