Spatial Language for Route-Based Humanoid Robot Navigation

A more natural interaction between humans and mobile robots can be achieved by bridging the gap between the format of spatial knowledge used by robots and the format of languages used by humans. This enables both of them to communicate by using shared knowledge. Spatial knowledge can be (re)presented in various ways to increase the interaction between humans and mobile robots. One effective way is to describe the route verbally to the robot. This method can permit computer language-naive users to control mobile robots, which understand spatial descriptions, to naturally perform complex tasks using succinct and intuitive commands. We present an instruction language to describe route-based navigation tasks for a humanoid robot. The instructions of this spatial language are implemented to provide an intuitive interface with which novice users can easily and naturally describe a navigation task for a mobile robot in a miniature city or in any other indoor environment. In our system, the instructions of the processed route description are analyzed to motion actions and spatial relationships via the command interpreter stage. The lexicon, which is implemented at the command interpreter stage, is defined in terms of the basic robot motion operations and it represents the mapping between route instructions and main navigational actions. Perceptual anchoring is used to ground the resulting motion actions and spatial relationships with the robot main actuator procedures