Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale

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.