COGNITIVE MODELING OF SPATIAL REFERENCE FOR HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION

Abstract

The question addressed in this paper is which types of spatial reference human users employ in the interaction with a robot and how a cognitively adequate model of these strategies can be implemented. In experiments we explored how human users approach an artificial communication partner, which was designed to mimic spatial reference among humans. Our findings show that spatial reference in human-robot interaction differs from natural situations in human-human interaction in seveal respects. For instance, many users unexpectedly employed fine-grained, path-based, instructions rather than specifying the intended goal object of the action directly. If instructions were not successful, participants created less and less complex descriptions. Those users who did specify the goal object were found to employ those kinds of spatial reference strategies implemented in our computational model. In particular, they exploited the presence of several similar objects by perceiving and referring to them linguistically as a group.