Dialogue with Robots to Support Symbiotic Autonomy

Abstract

Service Robotics is finding solutions to enable effective interaction with users. Among the several issues, the need of adapting robots to the way humans usually communicate is becoming a key and challenging task. In this context the design of robots that understand and reply in Natural Language plays a central role, especially when interactions involve untrained users. In particular, this is even more stressed in the framework of Symbiotic Autonomy, where an interaction is always required for the robot to accomplish a given task. In this paper, we propose a framework to model dialogues with robotic platforms, enabling effective and natural dialogic interactions. The framework relies on well-known theories as well as on perceptually informed spoken language understanding processors, giving rise to interactions that are tightly bound to the operating scenario.

Miscommunication Detection and Recovery in Situated Human–Robot Dialogue

“…Natural-language dialogue enables robots to ask clarification questions [30,59,84] and provide status updates [60,115] to conversational partners. Some of this research contributes to disambiguation methodologies [37,56,121], but a few attempt to renegotiate natural-language instructions that are not possible to execute [24,77,90].…”