Spatial Language for Human–Robot Dialogs

TLDR

Spatial relationships are routinely used in human conversation to describe surroundings and issue directions, and this work explores their use as a natural communication channel between people and robots, especially for novice users. The study integrates robot spatial relationships with a multimodal interface to facilitate natural human‑robot dialogue. The authors extract linguistic spatial descriptions and additional spatial cues from an evidence grid map and employ them for robot‑to‑human feedback and human‑to‑robot commands. The results reveal how these spatial expressions influence the semantic representation of spatial and locative information.

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 multimodal 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.