Reasoning on Shared Visual Perspective to Improve Route Directions

Abstract

We claim that the activity consisting in providing route directions can be best dealt with as a joint task involving the contribution not only of the robot as a direction provider but also of the human as listener. Moreover, we claim that in some cases, both the robot and the human should move to reach a different perspective of the environment which allows the explanations to be more efficient. As a first step toward implementing such a system, we propose the SVP (Shared Visual Perspective) planner which searches for the right placements both for the robot and the human to enable the visual perspective sharing needed for providing route direction and which makes the choice of the best landmark when several are available. The shared perspective is chosen taking into account not only the visibility of the landmarks, but the whole guiding task.