Meaningful conversation with mobile robots

Abstract

We describe an implementation integrating a complete spoken dialogue system with a mobile robot, which a human can direct to specific locations, ask for information about its status and supply information about its environment. The robot uses an internal map for navigation, and communicates its current orientation and accessible locations to the dialogue system using a topological map as interface. We focus on linguistic and inferential aspects of the human–robot communication process. The result is a novel approach using a principled semantic theory combined with techniques from automated deduction applied to a mobile robot platform. Due to the abstract level of the dialogue system, it is easily portable to other environments or applications.