A mechanism for human - robot interaction through informal voice commands

Interaction between humans and robots must, necessarily, be in a manner that is natural to humans, such as informal speech. While verbal command and control systems are fairly common, the human must know the exact phrases to issue in order for their robotic partner to respond appropriately. These systems define a few grammar rules that are used to match against incoming utterances. Here, we present a method of using these same grammar rules to expand the capabilities of command and control engines to include semantically similar utterances. Preliminary results from an experimental simulation are presented along with a detailed methodology of a recently completed study aimed at collecting human speech for a more rigorous analysis.