USER INTERFACE FOR AUTONOMOUS DRIVING ROBOT

This thesis is about the development of a Robotic User Interface for an autonomous service robot operating in an airport environment. The final purpose was to create an interface beautifully designed and, at the same time, intuitive for the end-user in order to create of facing with a familiar UI, even for the first time. For this reason, an Android-based tablet has been chosen for developing the interface, by following material design guidelines for the domain of graphics. The second area that has been treated in this thesis involves the development of a speech recognition algorithm for the implementation of a one-click interface able to minimize the number of steps necessary to perform an action and creating a natural Human-Robot interaction. In this regard, a theoretical analysis about Hidden Markov Models has been conducted, proceeding then with a trade-off analysis that has led to adopt Google Speech Recognizer API. The third domain that has been analyzed in this dissertation is the communication protocol to adopt for the interaction between the various subsystems focusing in particular on tablet-Jetson TX2 MQTT communication and on tablet-airport server communication.\\ Finally, the last two chapters end the whole discussion. The former describes first the adopted software testing phases for making the algorithm as reliable as possible and then the generic user tests conducted in order to shape the development of the interface on the basis of users' feedback. The latter presents a discussion about possible further implementations, on the basis of the conducted studies.