J.-H. Kim et al. (Eds.): FIRA 2009, CCIS 44, pp. 140–151, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 Experiences with a Barista Robot, FusionBot Dilip Kumar Limbu, Yeow Kee Tan, Chern Yuen Wong, Ridong Jiang, Hengxin Wu, Liyuan Li, Eng Hoe Kah, Xinguo Yu, Dong Li, and Haizhou Li Institute for Infocomm Research, 1 Fusionopolis Way, #21-01, Connexis, Singapore 138632 {dklimbu,yktan,cywong,rjiang,hxwu,lyli,kehoe,xinguo, ldong,hli}@i2r.a-star.edu.sg Abstract. In this paper, we describe the implemented service robot, called Fu- sionBot. The goal of this research is to explore and demonstrate the utility of an interactive service robot in a smart home environment, thereby improving the quality of human life. The robot has four main features: 1) speech recognition, 2) object recognition, 3) object grabbing and fetching and 4) communication with a smart coffee machine. Its software architecture employs a multimodal dialogue system that integrates different components, including spoken dialog system, vision understanding, navigation and smart device gateway. In the ex- periments conducted during the TechFest 2008 event, the FusionBot success- fully demonstrated that it could autonomously serve coffee to visitors on their request. Preliminary survey results indicate that the robot has potential to not only aid in the general robotics but also contribute towards the long term goal of intelligent service robotics in smart home environment. Keywords: Social robots, Human-robot interaction, Human perception and attitudes. 1 Introduction Recent research and development in robotics has spawned various new research direc- tions, including service robotics, field robotics, underwater robotics, and medical robotics. Service robotics is one of the promising avenues of research to which ro- botic technologies can be applied. In most cases, service robotics is designed to be autonomous, able to communicate with humans and participate in a given social con- text. With the advent of robotics technologies, the design and development of the service robotics has evolved drastically. In effect, service robotics is becoming prominent in the interactive robot development. Numerous service robots exist today in different service areas, such as museums [1, 2], receptions [3], food serving [4], hospitals [5], elder care [6], home tour [7] etc., making use of high robotics technologies. All these service robots perform certain tasks while providing various Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) interfaces, such as speech, vision and touch screen. To the best of our knowledge none of them offer a similar service to the one described in this paper. The service robot system that offers the closest service might be CARL[4], which is