Interaction Awareness for Joint Environment Exploration

Abstract

An important goal for research on service robots is the cooperation of a human and a robot as team. A service robot in a domestic environment needs to build a representation of its future workspace that corresponds to the human user's understanding of these surroundings. But it also needs to apply this model about the "where" and "what" in its current interaction to allow communication about objects and places in a human-adequate way. In this paper we present the integration of a hierarchical robotic mapping system into an interactive framework controlled by a dialog system. The goal is to use interactively acquired environment models to implement a robot with interaction aware behaviors. A major contribution of this work is a three-level hierarchy of spatial representation affecting three different communication dimensions. This hierarchy is consequently applied in the design of the grounding-based dialog, laser-based topological mapping, and an objects attention system. We demonstrate the benefits of this integration for learning and tour guiding in a human- comprehensible interaction between a robot and its user in a home-tour scenario. The enhanced interaction capabilities are crucial for developing a new generation of robots that will be accepted not only as service robots but also as robot companions.