An Interactive Approach for Situated Task Specification through Verbal Instructions

摘要

The ability to specify a task without having to write special software is an important and prominent feature for a mobile service robot deployed in a crowded office environment, working around and interacting with people. In this paper, we contribute an interactive approach for enabling the users to instruct tasks to a mobile service robot through verbal commands. The input is given as typed or spoken instructions, which are then mapped to the available sensing and actuation primitives on the robot. The main contributions of this work are the addition of conditionals on sensory information that the specified actions to be executed in a closed-loop manner, and a correction mode that allows an existing task to be modified or corrected at a later time by providing a replacement action during the test execution. We describe all the components of our approach along with the implementation details and illustrative examples in depth. We also discuss the extensibility of the presented approach, and point out potential future extensions.