Learning Understandable Concepts for Robot Navigation

Service robots have to communicate with their human users in order to get commands, give reports, provide information, and get help in cases of failure. Service robots are not autonomous, but this does not mean that they can do without intelligence. They need intelligence in order to convert high-level human commands into their internal procedures and to adapt their execution to the actual environment. The concepts in commands and plans must be anchored in the “body” of the robot and at the same time be understandable to the human user. This means that robot and user must agree in a particular situation what a concept refers to, even though — because of their different sensory systems and action capabilities — the concept is defined completely different by robot and user. The concept definitions of the robot should include sensing and action so that the concepts become precise and specific when applied to a particular situation. We call such concepts operational concepts.