The present study uses the dialogue paradigm to explore route communication. It revolves around t... more The present study uses the dialogue paradigm to explore route communication. It revolves around the analysis of a corpus of route instructions produced in real-time interaction with the follower. It explores the variation in forming route instructions and the factors that contribute in it. The results show that visual co-presence influences the performance, conversation patterns and configuration of instructions. Most importantly, the results suggest an analogy between the choices of instructiongivers and the communicative actions of their partners. 1.1 Spatial language in dialogue The main question this paper attempts to address is how people produce route instructions in dialogue. The current zeitgeist in language research and dialogue system development seems to be the unified investigation of spatial language and dialogue (Coventry et al., 2009). Indicative of the growing prioritisation of dialogue in the study of spatial language are the on-going research efforts within the Map...
Abstract—This paper investigates how users employ spatial descriptions to navigate a speech-enabl... more Abstract—This paper investigates how users employ spatial descriptions to navigate a speech-enabled robot. We created a simulated environment in which users gave route instructions in a dialogic real-time interaction with a robot, which was operated by naïve participants. The ability of robot monitoring was also manipulated in two experimental conditions. The results provide evidence that the content of the instructions and strategies of the users vary depending on the conditions and demands of the interaction. As expected, the route instructions frequently were underspecified and arbitrary. The findings of this study elucidate the complexity in interpreting spatial language in HRI. However, they also point to the need for endowing mobile robots with richer dialogue resources to compensate for the uncertainties arising from language as well as the environment. I.
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 2019
The performance and reliability of converting natural language into structured query language can... more The performance and reliability of converting natural language into structured query language can be problematic in handling nuances that are prevalent in natural language. Relational databases are not designed to understand language nuance, therefore the question why we must handle nuance has to be asked. This paper is looking at an alternative solution for the conversion of a Natural Language Query into a Structured Query Language (SQL) capable of being used to search a relational database. The process uses the natural language concept, Part of Speech to identify words that can be used to identify database tables and table columns. The use of Open NLP based grammar files, as well as additional configuration files, assist in the translation from natural language to query language. Having identified which tables and which columns contain the pertinent data the next step is to create the SQL statement.
The work presented in this thesis is part of a project in instruction based learning (IBL) for mo... more The work presented in this thesis is part of a project in instruction based learning (IBL) for mobile robots were a robot is designed that can be instructed by its users through unconstrained natural language. The robot uses vision guidance to follow route instructions in a miniature town model. The aim of the work presented here was to detenn.ine the functional vocabulary of the robot in d1e form of "primitive procedures". In contrast to previous work in the field of instructable robots this was done following a "user-centred" approach were the main concern was to create primitive procedures that can be directly associated with natural language instructions. To achieve this, a corpus of human-to-human natural language instructions was collected and analysed. A set of primitive actions was found with which the collected corpus could be represented. These primitive actions were then implemented as robot-executable procedures. Natural language instructions are under-specified when destined to be executed by a robot. This is because instructors omit information tl1at they consider as "commonsense" and rely on the listener's sensory-motor capabilities to determine the details of the task execution. In this thesis the underspecification problem is solved by determining the missing information, either during the learning of new routes or during their execution by the robot. During learning, the missing information is determined by imitating the commonsense approach human listeners take to achieve the same purpose. During execution, missing information, such as the location of road layout features mentioned in route instructions, is determined from the robot's view by using image template matching. The original contribution of this thesis, in both these methods, lies in the fact that they are driven by the natural language examples found in the corpus collected for the IDL project. 3 During the testing phase a high success rate of primitive calls, when these were considered individually, showed that the under-specification problem has overall been solved. A novel method for testing the primitive procedures, as part of complete route descriptions, is also proposed in this thesis. This was done by comparing the performance of human subjects when driving the robot, following route descriptions, with the performance of the robot when executing the same route descriptions. The results obtained from this comparison clearly indicated where errors occur from the time when a human speaker gives a route description to the time when the task is executed by a human listener or by the robot. Finally, a software speed controller is proposed in this thesis in order to control the wheel speeds of the robot used in this project. The controller employs PI (Proportional and Integral) and PID (Proportional, Integral and Differential) control and provides a good alternative to expensive hardware.
Computer programming is notoriously difficult to learn. To this end, regular practice in the form... more Computer programming is notoriously difficult to learn. To this end, regular practice in the form of application and reflection is an important enabler of student learning. However, educators often find that first-year B.Sc. students do not readily engage in such activities. Providing each student with a programmable robot, however, could be used to facilitate application and reflection since, potentially, robots facilitate engaging learning experiences whilst providing immediate and intuitive feedback. This paper explores whether an introductory course centred upon programming personal robots in preparation for an end-of-course event day-a Robot Olympics-can help students to firstly, engage in programming practice more frequently and secondly, improve the quality of their code. A survey was conducted to examine the students' programming practice behaviour and students' final coursework submissions were also reviewed for aspects of program quality. The findings from this cohort were compared to a reference-group from a previous cohort that shared similar learning objectives and entry requirements, yet had focused on web programming as opposed to using robots. The results reveal statistically significant increases in programming practice compared to the reference-group. Furthermore, being enrolled on the course culminating in the Robot Olympics was a significant predictor of two aspects of program quality: functional coherence and sophistication. This suggests that robot-centred courses can promote engagement with, and enhance some aspects of, programming practice.
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference on The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue - SIGDIAL '09, 2009
This paper presents the first step in designing a speech-enabled robot that is capable of natural... more This paper presents the first step in designing a speech-enabled robot that is capable of natural management of miscommunication. It describes the methods and results of two WOz studies, in which dyads of naïve participants interacted in a collaborative task. The first WOz study explored human miscommunication management. The second study investigated how shared visual space and monitoring shape the processes of feedback and communication in task-oriented interactions. The results provide insights for the development of human-inspired and robust natural language interfaces in robots.
This paper covers the use of monocular vision to control autonomous navigation for a robot in a d... more This paper covers the use of monocular vision to control autonomous navigation for a robot in a dynamically changing environment. The solution focused on using colour segmentation against a selected floor plane to distinctly separate obstacles from traversable space: this is then supplemented with canny edge detection to separate similarly coloured boundaries to the floor plane. The resulting binary map (where white identifies an obstacle-free area and black identifies an obstacle) could then be processed by fuzzy logic or neural networks to control the robot’s next movements. Findings show that the algorithm performed strongly on solid coloured carpets, wooden, and concrete floors but had difficulty in separating colours in multicoloured floor types such as patterned carpets.
Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 2011
This paper compares two different approaches of teaching introductory programming by quantitative... more This paper compares two different approaches of teaching introductory programming by quantitatively analysing the student assessments in a real classroom. The first approach is to emphasise the principles of object-oriented programming and design using Java from the very beginning. The second approach is to first teach the basic programming concepts (loops, branch, and use of libraries) using Python and then move on to oriented programming using Java. Each approach was adopted for one academic year (2008-09 and 2009-10) with first year undergraduate students. Quantitative analysis of the student assessments from the first semester of each year was then carried out. The results of this analysis are presented in this paper. These results suggest that the later approach leads to enhanced learning of introductory programming concepts by students.
Multi-robot cooperative localization serves as an essential task for a team of mobile robots to w... more Multi-robot cooperative localization serves as an essential task for a team of mobile robots to work within an unknown environment. Based on the real-time laser scanning data interaction, a robust approach is proposed to obtain optimal multi-robot relative observations by using the Metric-based Iterative Closest Point (MbICP) algorithm, which makes it possible to utilize the surrounding environment information directly instead of placing a localization-mark on the robots. To meet the demand of dealing with the inherent nonlinearities existing in the multi-robot kinematic models and the relative observations, a robust extended H ∞ filtering (REHF) approach is developed for the multi-robot cooperative localization system, which could handle non-Gaussian process and measurement noises with respect to robot navigation in unknown dynamic scenes. Compared with the conventional multi-robot localization system using extended Kalman filtering (EKF) approach, the proposed filtering algorithm is capable of providing superior performance in a dynamic indoor environment with outlier disturbances. Both numerical experiments and experiments conducted for the Pioneer 3-DX robots show that the proposed localization scheme is effective in improving both the accuracy and reliability of the performance within a complex environment.
This paper presents a novel approach to social data analysis, exploring the use of microblogging ... more This paper presents a novel approach to social data analysis, exploring the use of microblogging to manage interaction between humans and robots, and presenting and evaluating an architecture that extends the use of social networks to connect humans and devices. The approach uses natural language processing-in the form of simple grammar-based techniques-to extract features of interest from textual data retrieved from a microblogging platform in real-time and generate appropriate executable code for the robot. The simple rule-based solution exploits some of the 'natural' constraints imposed by microblogging platforms to manage the potential complexity of the interactions and create bi-directional communication. In order to evaluate the developed system, an analysis of real-time, user-generated social media data is presented. The analysis demonstrates the feasibility of producing programmes from the social media data which lead to executable actions by a front-end application-an approach of immediate relevance to web-based systems, like question-answering engines, personal digital assistants, and smart home/office devices.
The aim of this paper is to investigate managemen t of miscommunication in spontaneous interactio... more The aim of this paper is to investigate managemen t of miscommunication in spontaneous interaction between a human and a speech-enabled robot. The paper describes in itial results of an exploratory WOz study, in which pairs of naiv e participants interacted and collaborated in a navig ation task. The study is motivated by how humans achieve mutual understanding as well as previous research conducte in the area of spoken dialogue systems. The dialogue and error handling capacity of the wizard is incrementally impaired to wards the capabilities of a system in three experimental cond itions. Preliminary analysis of the data reveals the necess ity to endow the robot with richer error management resources an d point to the efficacy of less explicit error handling strate gies. Analysis of the data and further experimentation are currently performed and expected soon to shed light to some of the intricac ies and unique characteristics of HRI. 1
A novel approach to detect micro air vehicles in GPS-denied environments using an external RGB-D ... more A novel approach to detect micro air vehicles in GPS-denied environments using an external RGB-D sensor is presented. The nonparametric background subtraction technique incorporating several innovative mechanisms allows the detection of high-speed moving micro air vehicles by combining colour and depth information. The proposed method stores several colour and depth images as models and then compares each pixel from a frame with the stored models to classify the pixel as background or foreground. To adapt to scene changes, once a pixel is classified as background, the system updates the model by finding and substituting the closest pixel to the camera with the current pixel. The background model update presented uses different criteria from existing methods. Additionally, a blind update model is added to adapt to background sudden changes. The proposed architecture is compared with existing techniques using two different micro air vehicles and publicly available datasets. Results sh...
This paper presents the design and implementation of a system to allow the control of robots or o... more This paper presents the design and implementation of a system to allow the control of robots or other systems using natural language and social networks.
A novel background subtraction approach using RGB-D camera and an adaptive blind updating policy ... more A novel background subtraction approach using RGB-D camera and an adaptive blind updating policy is introduced. This method in initialization creates a model to store background pixels to compare each pixel of the new frame with the model in the same location to identify background pixels. The background-model update presented in this paper uses regular and blind update which also has a different criteria from existing methods. In particular, blind update frequently changes based on the background changes and the speed of moving object. This will allow the scene model to adapt to the changes in the background, detecting the stationary moving object and reducing the ghost phenomenon. In addition, proposed bootstrapping segmentation and shadow detection are added to the system to improve the accuracy of the algorithm in shadow and depth camouflage scenarios. The proposed method is compared with the original method and other state of the art algorithms. Experimental results show significant improvement in those videos that stationary object appear. In addition, the benchmark results also indicate strong and stable results compared to the other state of the art algorithms.
In corpus-based robotics, the primitive functions built into a robot are determined by the functi... more In corpus-based robotics, the primitive functions built into a robot are determined by the functional content of human utterances spoken to the robot. In the example of route instructions treated in this paper, the 15 primitives found include functions such as turn(), cross(), landmark_is_located(), etc. These are natural primitives of human behaviour but complex robot functions, some of which are not normally thought of by roboticists. Primitives must cope robustly with a variety of environmental conditions and require autonomous navigation capabilities based for instance on visual landmark recognition and localisation, navigable space mapping and path planning. Thus, the requirement of human-robot interaction creates specific and demanding functional targets for robot designers. A major obstacle to human-robot communication lies probably in current robots' perception capabilities. Furthermore, for human-robot communication to match the performance of human-human communication, the robot must also be provided with capabilities of re-interpreting and correcting instructions at execution time. Such a large autonomy raises wider issues of safety and control.
This paper investigates how users employ spatial descriptions to navigate a speech-enabled robot.... more This paper investigates how users employ spatial descriptions to navigate a speech-enabled robot. We created a simulated environment in which users gave route instructions in a dialogic real-time interaction with a robot, which was operated by naïve participants. The ability of robot monitoring was also manipulated in two experimental conditions. The results provide evidence that the content of the instructions and strategies of the users vary depending on the conditions and demands of the interaction. As expected, the route instructions frequently were underspecified and arbitrary. The findings of this study elucidate the complexity in interpreting spatial language in HRI. However, they also point to the need for endowing mobile robots with richer dialogue resources to compensate for the uncertainties arising from language as well as the environment.
The present study uses the dialogue paradigm to explore route communication. It revolves around t... more The present study uses the dialogue paradigm to explore route communication. It revolves around the analysis of a corpus of route instructions produced in real-time interaction with the follower. It explores the variation in forming route instructions and the factors that contribute in it. The results show that visual co-presence influences the performance, conversation patterns and configuration of instructions. Most importantly, the results suggest an analogy between the choices of instructiongivers and the communicative actions of their partners. 1.1 Spatial language in dialogue The main question this paper attempts to address is how people produce route instructions in dialogue. The current zeitgeist in language research and dialogue system development seems to be the unified investigation of spatial language and dialogue (Coventry et al., 2009). Indicative of the growing prioritisation of dialogue in the study of spatial language are the on-going research efforts within the Map...
Abstract—This paper investigates how users employ spatial descriptions to navigate a speech-enabl... more Abstract—This paper investigates how users employ spatial descriptions to navigate a speech-enabled robot. We created a simulated environment in which users gave route instructions in a dialogic real-time interaction with a robot, which was operated by naïve participants. The ability of robot monitoring was also manipulated in two experimental conditions. The results provide evidence that the content of the instructions and strategies of the users vary depending on the conditions and demands of the interaction. As expected, the route instructions frequently were underspecified and arbitrary. The findings of this study elucidate the complexity in interpreting spatial language in HRI. However, they also point to the need for endowing mobile robots with richer dialogue resources to compensate for the uncertainties arising from language as well as the environment. I.
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 2019
The performance and reliability of converting natural language into structured query language can... more The performance and reliability of converting natural language into structured query language can be problematic in handling nuances that are prevalent in natural language. Relational databases are not designed to understand language nuance, therefore the question why we must handle nuance has to be asked. This paper is looking at an alternative solution for the conversion of a Natural Language Query into a Structured Query Language (SQL) capable of being used to search a relational database. The process uses the natural language concept, Part of Speech to identify words that can be used to identify database tables and table columns. The use of Open NLP based grammar files, as well as additional configuration files, assist in the translation from natural language to query language. Having identified which tables and which columns contain the pertinent data the next step is to create the SQL statement.
The work presented in this thesis is part of a project in instruction based learning (IBL) for mo... more The work presented in this thesis is part of a project in instruction based learning (IBL) for mobile robots were a robot is designed that can be instructed by its users through unconstrained natural language. The robot uses vision guidance to follow route instructions in a miniature town model. The aim of the work presented here was to detenn.ine the functional vocabulary of the robot in d1e form of "primitive procedures". In contrast to previous work in the field of instructable robots this was done following a "user-centred" approach were the main concern was to create primitive procedures that can be directly associated with natural language instructions. To achieve this, a corpus of human-to-human natural language instructions was collected and analysed. A set of primitive actions was found with which the collected corpus could be represented. These primitive actions were then implemented as robot-executable procedures. Natural language instructions are under-specified when destined to be executed by a robot. This is because instructors omit information tl1at they consider as "commonsense" and rely on the listener's sensory-motor capabilities to determine the details of the task execution. In this thesis the underspecification problem is solved by determining the missing information, either during the learning of new routes or during their execution by the robot. During learning, the missing information is determined by imitating the commonsense approach human listeners take to achieve the same purpose. During execution, missing information, such as the location of road layout features mentioned in route instructions, is determined from the robot's view by using image template matching. The original contribution of this thesis, in both these methods, lies in the fact that they are driven by the natural language examples found in the corpus collected for the IDL project. 3 During the testing phase a high success rate of primitive calls, when these were considered individually, showed that the under-specification problem has overall been solved. A novel method for testing the primitive procedures, as part of complete route descriptions, is also proposed in this thesis. This was done by comparing the performance of human subjects when driving the robot, following route descriptions, with the performance of the robot when executing the same route descriptions. The results obtained from this comparison clearly indicated where errors occur from the time when a human speaker gives a route description to the time when the task is executed by a human listener or by the robot. Finally, a software speed controller is proposed in this thesis in order to control the wheel speeds of the robot used in this project. The controller employs PI (Proportional and Integral) and PID (Proportional, Integral and Differential) control and provides a good alternative to expensive hardware.
Computer programming is notoriously difficult to learn. To this end, regular practice in the form... more Computer programming is notoriously difficult to learn. To this end, regular practice in the form of application and reflection is an important enabler of student learning. However, educators often find that first-year B.Sc. students do not readily engage in such activities. Providing each student with a programmable robot, however, could be used to facilitate application and reflection since, potentially, robots facilitate engaging learning experiences whilst providing immediate and intuitive feedback. This paper explores whether an introductory course centred upon programming personal robots in preparation for an end-of-course event day-a Robot Olympics-can help students to firstly, engage in programming practice more frequently and secondly, improve the quality of their code. A survey was conducted to examine the students' programming practice behaviour and students' final coursework submissions were also reviewed for aspects of program quality. The findings from this cohort were compared to a reference-group from a previous cohort that shared similar learning objectives and entry requirements, yet had focused on web programming as opposed to using robots. The results reveal statistically significant increases in programming practice compared to the reference-group. Furthermore, being enrolled on the course culminating in the Robot Olympics was a significant predictor of two aspects of program quality: functional coherence and sophistication. This suggests that robot-centred courses can promote engagement with, and enhance some aspects of, programming practice.
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference on The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue - SIGDIAL '09, 2009
This paper presents the first step in designing a speech-enabled robot that is capable of natural... more This paper presents the first step in designing a speech-enabled robot that is capable of natural management of miscommunication. It describes the methods and results of two WOz studies, in which dyads of naïve participants interacted in a collaborative task. The first WOz study explored human miscommunication management. The second study investigated how shared visual space and monitoring shape the processes of feedback and communication in task-oriented interactions. The results provide insights for the development of human-inspired and robust natural language interfaces in robots.
This paper covers the use of monocular vision to control autonomous navigation for a robot in a d... more This paper covers the use of monocular vision to control autonomous navigation for a robot in a dynamically changing environment. The solution focused on using colour segmentation against a selected floor plane to distinctly separate obstacles from traversable space: this is then supplemented with canny edge detection to separate similarly coloured boundaries to the floor plane. The resulting binary map (where white identifies an obstacle-free area and black identifies an obstacle) could then be processed by fuzzy logic or neural networks to control the robot’s next movements. Findings show that the algorithm performed strongly on solid coloured carpets, wooden, and concrete floors but had difficulty in separating colours in multicoloured floor types such as patterned carpets.
Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 2011
This paper compares two different approaches of teaching introductory programming by quantitative... more This paper compares two different approaches of teaching introductory programming by quantitatively analysing the student assessments in a real classroom. The first approach is to emphasise the principles of object-oriented programming and design using Java from the very beginning. The second approach is to first teach the basic programming concepts (loops, branch, and use of libraries) using Python and then move on to oriented programming using Java. Each approach was adopted for one academic year (2008-09 and 2009-10) with first year undergraduate students. Quantitative analysis of the student assessments from the first semester of each year was then carried out. The results of this analysis are presented in this paper. These results suggest that the later approach leads to enhanced learning of introductory programming concepts by students.
Multi-robot cooperative localization serves as an essential task for a team of mobile robots to w... more Multi-robot cooperative localization serves as an essential task for a team of mobile robots to work within an unknown environment. Based on the real-time laser scanning data interaction, a robust approach is proposed to obtain optimal multi-robot relative observations by using the Metric-based Iterative Closest Point (MbICP) algorithm, which makes it possible to utilize the surrounding environment information directly instead of placing a localization-mark on the robots. To meet the demand of dealing with the inherent nonlinearities existing in the multi-robot kinematic models and the relative observations, a robust extended H ∞ filtering (REHF) approach is developed for the multi-robot cooperative localization system, which could handle non-Gaussian process and measurement noises with respect to robot navigation in unknown dynamic scenes. Compared with the conventional multi-robot localization system using extended Kalman filtering (EKF) approach, the proposed filtering algorithm is capable of providing superior performance in a dynamic indoor environment with outlier disturbances. Both numerical experiments and experiments conducted for the Pioneer 3-DX robots show that the proposed localization scheme is effective in improving both the accuracy and reliability of the performance within a complex environment.
This paper presents a novel approach to social data analysis, exploring the use of microblogging ... more This paper presents a novel approach to social data analysis, exploring the use of microblogging to manage interaction between humans and robots, and presenting and evaluating an architecture that extends the use of social networks to connect humans and devices. The approach uses natural language processing-in the form of simple grammar-based techniques-to extract features of interest from textual data retrieved from a microblogging platform in real-time and generate appropriate executable code for the robot. The simple rule-based solution exploits some of the 'natural' constraints imposed by microblogging platforms to manage the potential complexity of the interactions and create bi-directional communication. In order to evaluate the developed system, an analysis of real-time, user-generated social media data is presented. The analysis demonstrates the feasibility of producing programmes from the social media data which lead to executable actions by a front-end application-an approach of immediate relevance to web-based systems, like question-answering engines, personal digital assistants, and smart home/office devices.
The aim of this paper is to investigate managemen t of miscommunication in spontaneous interactio... more The aim of this paper is to investigate managemen t of miscommunication in spontaneous interaction between a human and a speech-enabled robot. The paper describes in itial results of an exploratory WOz study, in which pairs of naiv e participants interacted and collaborated in a navig ation task. The study is motivated by how humans achieve mutual understanding as well as previous research conducte in the area of spoken dialogue systems. The dialogue and error handling capacity of the wizard is incrementally impaired to wards the capabilities of a system in three experimental cond itions. Preliminary analysis of the data reveals the necess ity to endow the robot with richer error management resources an d point to the efficacy of less explicit error handling strate gies. Analysis of the data and further experimentation are currently performed and expected soon to shed light to some of the intricac ies and unique characteristics of HRI. 1
A novel approach to detect micro air vehicles in GPS-denied environments using an external RGB-D ... more A novel approach to detect micro air vehicles in GPS-denied environments using an external RGB-D sensor is presented. The nonparametric background subtraction technique incorporating several innovative mechanisms allows the detection of high-speed moving micro air vehicles by combining colour and depth information. The proposed method stores several colour and depth images as models and then compares each pixel from a frame with the stored models to classify the pixel as background or foreground. To adapt to scene changes, once a pixel is classified as background, the system updates the model by finding and substituting the closest pixel to the camera with the current pixel. The background model update presented uses different criteria from existing methods. Additionally, a blind update model is added to adapt to background sudden changes. The proposed architecture is compared with existing techniques using two different micro air vehicles and publicly available datasets. Results sh...
This paper presents the design and implementation of a system to allow the control of robots or o... more This paper presents the design and implementation of a system to allow the control of robots or other systems using natural language and social networks.
A novel background subtraction approach using RGB-D camera and an adaptive blind updating policy ... more A novel background subtraction approach using RGB-D camera and an adaptive blind updating policy is introduced. This method in initialization creates a model to store background pixels to compare each pixel of the new frame with the model in the same location to identify background pixels. The background-model update presented in this paper uses regular and blind update which also has a different criteria from existing methods. In particular, blind update frequently changes based on the background changes and the speed of moving object. This will allow the scene model to adapt to the changes in the background, detecting the stationary moving object and reducing the ghost phenomenon. In addition, proposed bootstrapping segmentation and shadow detection are added to the system to improve the accuracy of the algorithm in shadow and depth camouflage scenarios. The proposed method is compared with the original method and other state of the art algorithms. Experimental results show significant improvement in those videos that stationary object appear. In addition, the benchmark results also indicate strong and stable results compared to the other state of the art algorithms.
In corpus-based robotics, the primitive functions built into a robot are determined by the functi... more In corpus-based robotics, the primitive functions built into a robot are determined by the functional content of human utterances spoken to the robot. In the example of route instructions treated in this paper, the 15 primitives found include functions such as turn(), cross(), landmark_is_located(), etc. These are natural primitives of human behaviour but complex robot functions, some of which are not normally thought of by roboticists. Primitives must cope robustly with a variety of environmental conditions and require autonomous navigation capabilities based for instance on visual landmark recognition and localisation, navigable space mapping and path planning. Thus, the requirement of human-robot interaction creates specific and demanding functional targets for robot designers. A major obstacle to human-robot communication lies probably in current robots' perception capabilities. Furthermore, for human-robot communication to match the performance of human-human communication, the robot must also be provided with capabilities of re-interpreting and correcting instructions at execution time. Such a large autonomy raises wider issues of safety and control.
This paper investigates how users employ spatial descriptions to navigate a speech-enabled robot.... more This paper investigates how users employ spatial descriptions to navigate a speech-enabled robot. We created a simulated environment in which users gave route instructions in a dialogic real-time interaction with a robot, which was operated by naïve participants. The ability of robot monitoring was also manipulated in two experimental conditions. The results provide evidence that the content of the instructions and strategies of the users vary depending on the conditions and demands of the interaction. As expected, the route instructions frequently were underspecified and arbitrary. The findings of this study elucidate the complexity in interpreting spatial language in HRI. However, they also point to the need for endowing mobile robots with richer dialogue resources to compensate for the uncertainties arising from language as well as the environment.
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