Interpreting fuzzy directional information in navigational commands based on arrangement of the surrounding environment

Abstract

Human friendly service robots should possess human like interaction and reasoning capabilities. Humans prefer to use voice instructions in order to communicate with peers. Those voice instructions often include linguistic notions and descriptors that are fuzzy in nature. Therefore, the human friendly robots should be capable of understanding the fuzzy information in user instructions. This paper proposes a method in order to interpret directional information in navigational user commands by considering the environment dependent fuzziness associated with the directional linguistic notions. A module called Direction Interpreter has been introduced for handling the fuzzy nature of directional linguistic notions. The module has been implemented with a fuzzy logic system that is capable of modifying the perception of the robot about the directional information according to the surrounding environment of the robot. This modification is done by weighting the output membership function with the distribution of the free space around the robot. According to the experimental results, the proposed system is capable of replicating the natural directional perception of humans that depends on the environment to a greater extent than the existing approaches.