Meaningful conversation with mobile robots

We describe an implementation integrating a complete spoken dialogue system with a mobile robot, which a human can direct to specific locations, ask for information about its status and supply information about its environment. The robot uses an internal map for navigation, and communicates its current orientation and accessible locations to the dialogue system using a topological map as interface. We focus on linguistic and inferential aspects of the human–robot communication process. The result is a novel approach using a principled semantic theory combined with techniques from automated deduction applied to a mobile robot platform. Due to the abstract level of the dialogue system, it is easily portable to other environments or applications.     

Situated Spoken Dialogue with Robots Using Active Learning

In a human–robot spoken dialogue, the robot may misunderstand an ambiguous command from the user, such as 'Place the cup down (on the table)', thus running the risk of an accident. Although asking confirmation questions before the execution of any motion will decrease the risk of such failure, the user will find it more convenient if confirmation questions are not used in trivial situations. This paper proposes a method for estimating ambiguity in commands by introducing an active learning scheme with Bayesian logistic regression to human–robot spoken dialogue. We conduct physical experiments in which a user and a manipulator-based robot communicate using spoken language to manipulate objects.     

On developing a voice-enabled interface for interactive tour-guide robots

This paper considers design methodologies in order to develop voice-enabled interfaces for tour-guide robots deployed at the Robotics Exposition of the Swiss National Exhibition (Expo.02). Human-robot voice communication presents new challenges for design of fully autonomous mobile robots, in that interactivity must be robot-initiated in conversation and within a dynamic adverse environment. We approached these general problems for a voice-enabled interface, tailored to limited computational resources of one on-board processor, when integrating smart speech signal acquisition, automatic speech recognition and synthesis, as well as a dialogue system into the multi-modal, multi-sensor interface for the expo tour-guide robot. We also focus on particular issues that needed to be addressed in voice-based interaction when planning specific tasks and research experiments for Expo.02, where tour-guide robots had to interact with hundreds of thousands of visitors over 6 months, 7 days a week, 10 h per day.