Human-robot interaction through spoken language dialogue

The development of robots that are able to accept instructions, via a friendly interface, in terms of concepts that are familiar to a human user remains a challenge. It is argued that designing and building such intelligent robots can be seen as the problem of integrating four main dimensions: human-robot communication, sensory motor skills and perception, decision-making capabilities, and learning. Although these dimensions have been thoroughly studied in the past, their integration has seldom been attempted in a systematic way. It is further argued that, for the common user, the only sufficiently practical interface is spoken language. The “body and soul” of CARL (Communication, Action, Reasoning and Learning), a robot currently under construction in our laboratory, are presented. The spoken-language interface is given particular attention