Natural Programming of a Social Robot by Dialogs (original) (raw)

End-user programming of a social robot by dialog

Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2011

One of the main challenges faced by social robots is how to provide intuitive, natural and enjoyable usability for the end-user. In our ordinary environment, social robots could be important tools for education and entertainment (edutainment) in a variety of ways. This paper presents a Natural Programming System (NPS) that is geared to non-expert users. The main goal of such a system is to provide an enjoyable interactive platform for the users to build different programs within their social robot platform. The end-user can build a complex net of actions and conditions (a sequence) in a social robot via mixed-initiative dialogs and multimodal interaction. The system has been implemented and tested in Maggie, a real social robot with multiple skills, conceived as a general HRI researching platform. The robot's internal features (skills) have been implemented to be verbally accessible to the end-user, who can combine them into others more complex following a bottom-up model. The built sequence is internally implemented as a Sequence Function Chart (SFC), which allows parallel execution, modularity and re-use. A multimodal Dialog Manager System (DMS) takes charge of keeping the coherence of the interaction. This work is thought for bringing social robots closer to non-expert users, who can play the game of "teaching how to do things" with the robot.

More than just words: Building a chatty robot

IWSDS, 2012

Speech meditates human interactions in all areas of life. Some conversations have a clear purpose such as communicating important information (warning) or creating change (giving an order), while, in others, the goal of the exchange is not so much to transfer linguistic information as to cement social bonds.

A dialog system for comparative user studies on robot verbal behavior

Robot and Human Interactive …, 2006

In domestic social robot systems the dialog system is often the main user interface. The verbal behavior of such a robot, therefore, plays crucial role in human-robot interaction. Comparative user studies on various verbal behaviors of a robot can effectively contribute to human-robot interaction research. In this paper we present a dialog system that can be easily configured to demonstrate different verbal, initiativetaking behaviors for a robot and, thus, can be used as a platform for such comparative user studies. The pilot study we conducted does not only provide strong evidence for this suitability, but also reveals benefits of comparative studies on a real robot in general.

A Configurable Dialogue Platform for ASORO Robots

2011

This paper is concerned with the architectural design and development of a spoken dialogue platform for robots. The platform adopts modular software architecture and event driven communication paradigm which makes speech enabled hardware devices and software components configurable and reusable. The platform is able to integrate heterogeneous dialogue components (such as speech recognizer, natural language understanding, speech synthesizer, etc.) through message-oriented middleware and a number of adaptors in a plug-and-play fashion. The dialogue system is empowered by a multi-purpose XML-based dialogue engine which is capable for pipeline information flow construction, programmable event mediation, multi-topic dialogue modeling and different types of knowledge representation. The proposed platform provides a generic framework for the easy and quick construction of robust, efficient and flexible spoken dialogue applications ranging from simple state-based dialogue prototype to compl...

Natural Interaction with Personality and Dialogue Enabled Robots

System Demonstrations, Companion volume to the proceedings of the 6th Hellenic AI Conference (SETN 10)

The subject of this demonstration is natural human robot interaction. More specifically we demonstrate specific technological advancements that enable robots to perceive and understand natural human behavior as well as to act in ways that are familiar to humans. The demonstration is built around a museum guide use-case, where a simulated robotic guide is operating in a virtual environment. During the demonstration visitors are able to interact with the simulated robot using natural language and gestures. At the same time, videos of a real robot operating in a real museum are also demonstrated. Both the real and the simulated robot are using the same software components.

Towards a Personal Robot with Spoken Language Interface

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 explicit 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.

Developing Human-Robot Dialogue Management Formally

2005

In shared-control systems, such as intelligent service robots, a human operator and an automated technical system are interdependently in charge of control. Natural Language dialogues have long been acknowledged as a potentially fruitful modality for instructing, describing and negotiating in human-machine interfaces. Since shared-control systems are often embedded in safety-critical devices, formal methods are thus widely used for improving the quality of such systems. In this paper, we present a formal method based approach for dialogue management and show how it enhances the clarity of dialog modelling, provides several engineering properties (e.g., validation, test and simulation) and supports the generation of clarification subdialogues.

A Review on The Development and Effect of Conversational Agents and Social Robots

HCI addresses to the concept of Human-Machine communication through including but not limited to AI-enabled embodied conversational software agents. The emergence of these agents has changed the history of computing and robotics once and for all. One of the most prominent social and intellectual qualities in humans is the ability to have conversations. Typically, a conversation takes place between people through verbal and non-verbal mediums. Languages play a vital role in these communications and conversations. Humanness and human-like interaction qualities are found to be in the core of the human-computer interface designs from the beginning of this research doctrine [1]. Programming languages has enabled computer scientists to establish a connection between humans and machines that enables the machine to understand the instructions given. However, the widespread use of cell phones, computers and other smart gadgets has clearly made it a demand of time that the machines used today can understand the commands given in natural languages (i.e. English, German, Spanish, etc.) as the user set is not limited to the computer scientists anymore[1]. Hence, robotics, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. has combined force to bridge the communication gap between the machines and the users. From ELIZA [3], Rea [4] to Siri, Amazon Alexa or Google assistant, the software interfaces has come a long way through a lengthy development process. They have proven to have enough influence to change the social, economic and political outcomes through their intelligent behavior [2]. The boundary between human-like and bot-like behavior is greyer then it is black and white [2]. The software interfaces has changed their appearance over the time by stripping down from the ideals of face-to-face conversations. The chatbots (i.e. Twitter bots) found online has developed different social media ecosystems [2] where humans and robots interact with each other in the same plane. To have a conversation or interaction with the machines humans are being trained to accept and use a new set of vocabularies [1]. In this paper, I would like to discuss how these conversational agents and social robots are shaping our social media ecosystems. I will revisit the interrelation between humans and machines while focusing on the socio-cultural impact of these robots into our IoT –enabled smart homes and online virtual spaces.

The Curious Robot as a Case-Study for Comparing Dialog Systems

2011

Modeling interaction with robots raises new and different challenges for dialog modeling than traditional dialog modeling with less embodied machines. We present four case studies of implementing a typical humanrobot interaction scenario with different state ...

A spoken dialogue system to control robots

Projektarbeten 2002, 2002

Speech recognition is available on ordinary personal computers and is starting to appear in standard software applications. A known problem with speech interfaces is their integration into current graphical user interfaces.