Interaction Awareness for Joint Environment Exploration

An important goal for research on service robots is the cooperation of a human and a robot as team. A service robot in a domestic environment needs to build a representation of its future workspace that corresponds to the human user\´s understanding of these surroundings. But it also needs to apply this model about the "where" and "what" in its current interaction to allow communication about objects and places in a human-adequate way. In this paper we present the integration of a hierarchical robotic mapping system into an interactive framework controlled by a dialog system. The goal is to use interactively acquired environment models to implement a robot with interaction aware behaviors. A major contribution of this work is a three-level hierarchy of spatial representation affecting three different communication dimensions. This hierarchy is consequently applied in the design of the grounding-based dialog, laser-based topological mapping, and an objects attention system. We demonstrate the benefits of this integration for learning and tour guiding in a human- comprehensible interaction between a robot and its user in a home-tour scenario. The enhanced interaction capabilities are crucial for developing a new generation of robots that will be accepted not only as service robots but also as robot companions.