A URC, which is a Ubiquitous Robot Companion, provides services to users in ubiquitous computing environments and has advantage of simplifying robot's hardware and software by distributing the complicated functionality of robots to other system. In this paper, we propose SOWL, which is a software architecture for URC robots and a mixed word of SOMAR and CAWL. SOWL keeps the advantages of URC and it also has the loosely-coupled characteristics. Moreover it makes it easy to develop of URC robot software. The proposed architecture is composed of 4 layers: device software, robot software, robot application, and end user layer. Developers of the each layer is able to build software suitable for their requirements by combining software modules in the lower layer. SOWL consists of SOMAR and CAWL engine. SOMAR, which is a middleware for the execution of device software and robot software, is based on service-oriented architecture(SOA) for robot software. CAWL engine is a system to process CAWL which is a context-aware workflow language. SOWL is able to provide a layered architecture for the execution of a robot software. It also makes it possible for developers of the each layer to build module-based robot software.

Combining robot and network gives us many advantages like lightweight hardware specification of robot, a various robot service, simple upgrade of robot, easy management and so on. Among these advantages, Presence service and openAPI are most important. Presence is simple but powerful service. It makes user to know the status information of robot and enables user to control robot from a remote place. OpenAPI which is also a feature of WEB2.0 enables 3rd parties to make a various mashup service easily and rapidly. Finally presence and openAPI can help URC service to be ubiquitous and successful.

Abstract This paper presents a speaker recognition system intended for use in human-robot interaction. The proposed speaker recognition system can achieve significantly high performance in the Ubiquitous Robot Companion (URC) environment. The URC concept is a scenario in which a robot is connected to a server through a broadband connection allowing functions to be performed on the server side, thereby minimizing the stand-alone function significantly and reducing the robot client cost. Instead of giving a robot (client) on-board cognitive capabilities, the sensing and processing work are outsourced to a central computer (server) connected to the high-speed Internet, with only the moving capability provided by the robot. Our aim is to enhance human-robot interaction by increasing the performance of speaker recognition with multiple microphones on the robot side in adverse distant-talking environments. Our speaker recognizer provides the URC project with a basic interface for human-robot interaction.