Towards a personal robot with language interface

Abstract

The development of robots capable of accepting instructions in terms of familiar concepts to the user is still a challenge. For these robots to emerge it’s essential the development of natural language interfaces, since this is regarded as the only interface acceptable for a machine which expected to have a high level of interactivity with Man. Our group has been involved for several years in the development of a mobile intelligent robot, named Carl, designed having in mind such tasks as serving food in a reception or acting as a host in an organization. The approach that has been followed in the design of Carl is based on an ex-plicit concern with the integration of the major dimensions of intelligence, namely Communication, Action, Reasoning and Learning. This paper focuses on the multi-modal human-robot language communication capabilities of Carl, since these have been significantly improved during the last year. 1.