Grounding spatial relations for human-robot interaction

Abstract

We propose a system for human-robot interaction that learns both models for spatial prepositions and for object recognition. Our system grounds the meaning of an input sentence in terms of visual percepts coming from the robot's sensors in order to send an appropriate command to the PR2 or respond to spatial queries. To perform this grounding, the system recognizes the objects in the scene, determines which spatial relations hold between those objects, and semantically parses the input sentence. The proposed system uses the visual and spatial information in conjunction with the semantic parse to interpret statements that refer to objects (nouns), their spatial relationships (prepositions), and to execute commands (actions). The semantic parse is inherently compositional, allowing the robot to understand complex commands that refer to multiple objects and relations such as: 'Move the cup close to the robot to the area in front of the plate and behind the tea box'. Our system correctly parses 94% of the 210 online test sentences, correctly interprets 91% of the correctly parsed sentences, and correctly executes 89% of the correctly interpreted sentences. © 2013 IEEE.