Vocalics is the study of the nonverbal aspects of speech, such as volume, pitch, and rate. Our contribution is a parametric We present an overview of the control, recognition, decision-making, vocalic behavior controller that autonomously adjusts and learning techniques utilized by the Interaction the robot speaker volume based on models of how a Lab (robotics.usc.edu/interaction) at the University human user will hear speech produced by the robot. These of Southern California (USC) to enable autonomy in sociable models vary with distance, orientation, and perceived environmental and socially assistive robots. These techniques are implemented interference (Mead & Matarić 2014). Our future with two software libraries: 1) the Social Behavior work will investigate adapting the pitch and rate of speech Library (SBL) provides autonomous social behavior produced by a robot to improve user speech perception.

As a robot formation increases in size or explores places where it is difficult for a human operator to interact, autonomous control becomes critical. We propose a distributed autonomous method for evaluating properties of multi-robot systems, and then discuss how this information can be applied to improve performance with respect to a given operation. We present this as an extension of our previous work on robot formations; however, the techniques described could be adapted to other multi-robot systems.