Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro

Transverse Activity on Intelligent Robotics

Human-robot interaction

Presentation

Team

Campus de Santiago
3810-193 Aveiro - Portugal
tel. +351 234 370 500
fax +351 234 370 545

lsl at ua pt

Description

The CARL project ("Communication, Action, Reasoning and Learning in Robotics"), funded by FCT / PRAXIS XXI between 1999 and 2001, was the starting research project for ATRI. As the name suggests, this project aimed to study the interrelations and integration of the main dimensions of robot intelligence.

The main research scenario for this project is a "tour guiding" or "hosting" scenario. This is an application in which a robot enters in dialogue with the tourist or visitor, answering the questions that the tourist asks, and skipping the aspects in which the tourist does not seem to be interested. That means that the robot needs to maintain a knowledge representation about what there is to see, adapt to the user and, at the same time, do all other things that robots are expected to do in the physical world, particularly navigation and localization. A longer term demonstration scenari is a “mobile manipulator” for materials handling in unstructured environments.

For the "tour guide" / "host" application, the Carl robot (left) was developed. Already featuring spoken language dialog, it was presented for the first time to an international audience in the 2001 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition (Seattle, WA). During 2002, the interaction capabilities of Carl were extended to include an animated face and touch-screen interaction. This new version of Carl, which is 1.1 m tall, was presented at the welcome reception of IROS'2002 (Lausanne, Switzerland). Currently, a dialog management strategy based on the information state approach is used. The robot is able to accumulate and integrate knowledge provided by different users. Knowledge is stored in a semantic-net form and question answering uses inductive, deductive and analogical inference.

Related publications

Quinderé, M., L. Seabra Lopes and A.J.S. Teixeira (2007) A Dialog Manager for an Intelligent Mobile Robot, Proc. Workshop on natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science (NLPCS-2007), Funchal, Madeira, June 12-13, p. 191-200.

Seabra Lopes, L., A.J.S. Teixeira, M. Quinderé and M. Rodrigues (2005) From Robust Spoken Language Understanding to Knowledge Acquisition and Management, Proc. Interspeech’2005, Lisboa, Portugal, p. 3469-3472.

Seabra Lopes, L., A. Teixeira, M. Rodrigues, D. Gomes, C. Teixeira, L. Ferreira, P. Soares, J. Girão & N. Sénica (2003) Towards a Personal Robot with Language Interface, Proc. Eurospeech'2003, p. 2205-2208.

Seabra Lopes, L. (2002) Carl: from Situated Activity to Language Level Interaction and Learning, Proc. IEEE Int'l Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'2002), Lausanne, Switzerland, p. 890-896.

Seabra Lopes, L. and A.J.S. Teixeira (2000) Human-Robot Interaction through Spoken Language Dialogue, Proceedings IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems(IROS'2000), Japan, p. 528-534.

Last page update: 2007-07-25