Spatial Language for Human-Robot Dialogs

Abstract

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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA434960

Entities

People

  • Alan Schultz
  • Dennis J. Perzanowski
  • Derek Brock
  • Magda Bugajska
  • Marjorie Skubic
  • Sam Blisard
  • William Adams

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Directives
  • Environment
  • Human-Robot Interaction
  • Image Processing
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • Navigation
  • Operating Systems
  • Personal Digital Assistants
  • Pilot Studies
  • Robots

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Linguistics

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Autonomous Systems
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation
  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Human-Robot Interaction