Mixed-Initiative Interaction between Human and Service Robot using Hierarchical Bayesian Networks

In daily activities, the interaction between humans and robots is very important for supporting the user's task effectively. Dialogue may be useful to increase the flexibility and facility of interaction between them. Traditional studies of robots have only dealt with simple queries like commands for interaction, but in real conversation it is more complex and various for using many ways of expression, so people can often omit some words relying on the background knowledge or the context of the discourse. Since the same queries can have various meaning by this reason, it is needed to manage this situation. In this paper we propose a method that uses hierarchical bayesian networks to implement mixed-initiative interaction for managing vagueness of conversation in the service robot. We have verified the usefulness of the proposed method through the simulation of the service robot and usability test.