Following and interpreting narrated guided tours

We describe a robotic tour-taking capability enabling a robot to acquire local knowledge of a human-occupied environment. A tour-taking robot autonomously follows a human guide through an environment, interpreting the guide's spoken utterances and the shared spatiotemporal context in order to acquire a spatially segmented and semantically labeled metrical-topological representation of the environment. The described tour-taking capability enables scalable deployment of mobile robots into human-occupied environments, and natural human-robot interaction for commanded mobility. Our primary contributions are an efficient, socially acceptable autonomous tour-following behavior and a tour interpretation algorithm that partitions a map into spaces labeled according to the guide's utterances. The tour-taking behavior is demonstrated in a multi-floor office building and evaluated by assessing the comfort of the tour guides, and by comparing the robot's map partitions to those produced by humans.

[1]  James R. Glass.  A probabilistic framework for segment-based speech recognition , 2003, Comput. Speech Lang..

[2]  Dieter Fox,et al.  Voronoi Random Fields: Extracting Topological Structure of Indoor Environments via Place Labeling , 2007, IJCAI.

[3]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  An Integrated Robotic System for Spatial Understanding and Situated Interaction in Indoor Environments , 2007, AAAI.

[4]  Stefanie Tellex,et al.  Toward understanding natural language directions , 2010, 2010 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[5]  R. C. Coulter,et al.  Implementation of the Pure Pursuit Path Tracking Algorithm , 1992 .

[6]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Tracking for following and passing persons , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Christian Schlegel,et al.  Vision Based Person Tracking with a Mobile Robot , 1998, BMVC.

[8]  Hugh Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping ( SLAM ) : Part I The Essential Algorithms , 2006 .

[9]  Zhichao Chen,et al.  Person following with a mobile robot using binocular feature-based tracking , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[10]  Hugh Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM): part II , 2006 .

[11]  Reid G. Simmons,et al.  Natural person-following behavior for social robots , 2007, 2007 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[12]  David Lee,et al.  The influence of subjects' personality traits on personal spatial zones in a human-robot interaction experiment , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..

[13]  Luke Fletcher,et al.  Multiple relative pose graphs for robust cooperative mapping , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[14]  Nicholas Roy,et al.  Topological mapping using spectral clustering and classification , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[15]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Supervised Learning of Places from Range Data using AdaBoost , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[16]  T. McNamara.  Mental representations of spatial relations , 1986, Cognitive Psychology.

[17]  Kai Oliver Arras,et al.  Place-dependent people tracking , 2011, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[18]  Ben J. A. Kröse,et al.  BIRON, where are you? Enabling a robot to learn new places in a real home environment by integrating spoken dialog and visual localization , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[19]  Frank Dellaert,et al.  iSAM: Incremental Smoothing and Mapping , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[20]  Frank Dellaert,et al.  Incremental smoothing and mapping , 2008 .

[21]  Peter Cheeseman,et al.  On the Representation and Estimation of Spatial Uncertainty , 1986 .

[22]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  FastSLAM 2.0: An Improved Particle Filtering Algorithm for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping that Provably Converges , 2003, IJCAI.

[23]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Human-robot embodied interaction in hallway settings: a pilot user study , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..