The use of scripts based on conceptual dependency primitives for the operation of service mobile robots

Abstract

This paper describes a Human-Robot interaction subsystem that is part of a robotics architecture, the ViRbot, used to control the operation of service mobile robots. The Human/Robot Interface subsystem consists of tree modules: Natural Language Understanding, Speech Generation and Robot's Facial Expressions. To demonstrate the utility of this Human-Robot interaction subsystem it is presented a set of applications that allows a user to command a mobile robot through spoken commands. The mobile robot accomplish the required commands using an actions planner and reactive behaviors. In the ViRbot architecture the actions planner module uses Conceptual Dependency (CD) primitives as the base for representing the problem domain. After a command is spoken a CD representation of it is generated, a rule base system takes this CD representation, and using the state of the environment generates other subtasks represented by CDs to accomplish the command. In this paper is also presented how to represent context through scripts. Using scripts it is easy to make inferences about events for which there are incomplete information or are ambiguous. Scripts serve to encode common sense knowledge. Scripts are also used to fill the gaps between seemingly unrelated events. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.