Verbalization: Narration of Autonomous Robot Experience

Autonomous mobile robots navigate in our spaces by planning and executing routes to destinations. When a mobile robot appears at a location, there is no clear way to understand what navigational path the robot planned and experienced just by looking at it. In this work, we address the generation of narrations of autonomous mobile robot navigation experiences. We contribute the concept of verbalization as a parallel to the well-studied concept of visualization. Through verbalizations, robots can describe through language what they experience, in particular in their paths. For every executed path, we consider many possible verbalizations that could be generated. We introduce the verbalization space that covers the variability of utterances that the robot may use to narrate its experience to different humans. We present an algorithm for segmenting a path and mapping each segment to an utterance, as a function of the desired point in the verbalization space, and demonstrate its application using our mobile service robot moving in our buildings. We believe our verbalization space and algorithm are applicable to different narrative aspects for many mobile robots, including autonomous cars.

[1]  James U. Korein,et al.  Robotics , 2018, IBM Syst. J..

[2]  Thomas Rist,et al.  Rocco: A RoboCup Soccer Commentator System , 1998, RoboCup.

[3]  Ron Burns,et al.  Development of the HRL Route Navigation Dialogue System , 2001, HLT.

[4]  D. Saucier,et al.  Males and females scan maps similarly, but give directions differently , 2003, Brain and Cognition.

[5]  Stephanie Rosenthal,et al.  Designing robots for long-term social interaction , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[6]  Manuela M. Veloso,et al.  A Team of Humanoid Game Commentators , 2006, 2006 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots.

[7]  Yifeng Zeng,et al.  Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems , 2007, AAMAS 2007.

[8]  Ladislau Bölöni,et al.  Automatic annotation of team actions in observations of embodied agents , 2007, AAMAS '07.

[9]  Anind K. Dey.  Explanations in Context-Aware Systems , 2009, ExaCt.

[10]  Anind K. Dey,et al.  Why and why not explanations improve the intelligibility of context-aware intelligent systems , 2009, CHI.

[11]  M. Neji,et al.  Semantic annotation formalism of video-conferencing documents , 2009 .

[12]  Anind K. Dey,et al.  Toolkit to support intelligibility in context-aware applications , 2010, UbiComp.

[13]  Stephanie Rosenthal,et al.  An effective personal mobile robot agent through symbiotic human-robot interaction , 2010, AAMAS.

[14]  Lawrence Birnbaum,et al.  StatsMonkey: A Data-Driven Sports Narrative Writer , 2010, AAAI Fall Symposium: Computational Models of Narrative.

[15]  Marc Langheinrich,et al.  Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing , 2010, Ubicomp 2010.

[16]  Todd Kulesza,et al.  Tell me more?: the effects of mental model soundness on personalizing an intelligent agent , 2012, CHI.

[17]  Manuela M. Veloso,et al.  Localization and navigation of the CoBots over long-term deployments , 2013, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[18]  Weng-Keen Wong,et al.  Too much, too little, or just right? Ways explanations impact end users' mental models , 2013, 2013 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing.

[19]  Manuela M. Veloso,et al.  Episodic non-Markov localization: Reasoning about short-term and long-term features , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[20]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Directions robot: in-the-wild experiences and lessons learned , 2014, AAMAS.

[21]  Peter Stone,et al.  Learning to Interpret Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog , 2015, IJCAI.

[22]  Manuela M. Veloso,et al.  Learning Task Knowledge from Dialog and Web Access , 2015, Robotics.

[23]  Manuela M. Veloso,et al.  Handling Complex Commands as Service Robot Task Requests , 2015, IJCAI.

[24]  Dympna O'Sullivan,et al.  The Role of Explanations on Trust and Reliance in Clinical Decision Support Systems , 2015, 2015 International Conference on Healthcare Informatics.

[25]  Stephanie Rosenthal,et al.  CoBots: Robust Symbiotic Autonomous Mobile Service Robots , 2015, IJCAI.

[26]  Jose M. Such,et al.  International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) , 2016 .