Situated Dialogue and Spatial Organization: What, Where… and Why?

Abstract

The paper presents an HRI architecture for human-augmented mapping, which has been implemented and tested on an autonomous mobile robotic platform. Through interaction with a human, the robot can augment its autonomously acquired metric map with qualitative information about locations and objects in the environment. The system implements various interaction strategies observed in independently performed Wizard-of-Oz studies. The paper discusses an ontology-based approach to multi-layered conceptual spatial mapping that provides a common ground for human-robot dialogue. This is achieved by combining acquired knowledge with innate conceptual commonsense knowledge in order to infer new knowledge. The architecture bridges the gap between the rich semantic representations of the meaning expressed by verbal utterances on the one hand and the robot's internal sensor-based world representation on the other. It is thus possible to establish references to spatial areas in a situated dialogue between a human and a robot about their environment. The resulting conceptual descriptions represent qualitative knowledge about locations in the environment that can serve as a basis for achieving a notion of situational awareness.