Towards Dialogue Based Shared Control of Navigating Robots

Establishing a clean relationship between a robot's spatial model and natural language components is a non-trivial task, but is key to designing verbally controlled, navigating service robots. In this paper we examine the issues involved in the development of dialogue controlled navigating robots. In particular, we treat our robots as so-called Shared Control Systems, where robot and user cooperate to achieve a shared goal. We begin by characterising four categories of Shared Control Problems that affect verbally controlled navigating robots. Producing solutions to these problems requires a clear methodology in the linking of 'common-sense' representations of space used by the robots, and the language interface. To this end, we present the SharC Cognitive Control Architecture as a general purpose, agent-based dialogue control system that provides a suitable framework for relating spatial information to natural language communication. To illustrate our approach, we focus in particular on natural language understanding, and show how natural language utterances may be mapped to formally modelled spatial concepts, thus helping to overcome problems in shared control.

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