Speech Act Classification in Collaborative Robotics

Collaborative robots seamlessly share the space with humans in production scenarios such as those involved in smart manufacturing and agriculture, thus raising several human safety concerns. Since a collaboration between humans and robots is performed through communicative acts, applying accurate techniques for understanding them is of the utmost importance to guarantee the overall safety of the human. A preliminary classification of the communicative acts into categories is required to increase the accuracy of adopted methods and the promptness of the response. This paper evaluates a speech communicative act classification methodology in the challenging scenario of precision agriculture using Virtual Reality (VR). Our proposal can easily be applied to any production scenario involving collaborative robots.