Grounding of actions based on verbalized physical effects and manipulation primitives

Abstract

One long term goal of robotic research is the development of robot systems, which have approximately the same cognitive, communicational, and manipulative abilities like humans and which can be operated by non-experts. The usage by non-experts sets additional requirements to the abilities of a robot system. For instance, the system should be able to understand natural language as one of the primary communication forms. This requires knowledge about actions, which shall be executed, or about objects, which shall be manipulated. In this work, we focus on grounding knowledge for actions within the domain of object manipulation. Our approach is based on the concept of verbalized physical effects and manipulation primitives. Therefore, we introduce the concept of verbalized physical effects, describe the relations between verbal instructions, verbalized physical effects and sensor based robot motions, and evaluate our approach using a robot manipulator.