Spatial Language for Human-Robot Dialogs

摘要

In conversation, people often use spatial relationships to describe their environment, e.g., 'There is a desk in front of me and a doorway behind it', and to issue directives, e.g., 'Go around the desk and through the doorway.' In our research, we have been investigating the use of spatial relationships to establish a natural communication mechanism between people and robots, in particular, for novice users. In this paper, the work on robot spatial relationships is combined with a multi-modal robot interface. We show how linguistic spatial descriptions and other spatial information can be extracted from an evidence grid map and how this information can be used in a natural, human-robot dialog. Examples using spatial language are included for both robot-to-human feedback and also human-to-robot commands. We also discuss some linguistic consequences in the semantic representations of spatial and locative information based on this work.