Interpretation of fuzzy voice commands for robots based on vocal cues guided by user´s willingness

This paper proposes a method for interpretation of fuzzy voice commands based on the vocal cues. The fuzzy voice commands include fuzzy linguistic terms like “little” and quantitative meaning of such terms depends on the environmental conditions. Therefore the robot´s perception of the corresponding environment is modified by acquiring the user´s perception through a series of vocal cues. The user´s willingness to change the robot´s perception is identified based on the vocal cues to improve the adaptation process. The primitive behaviors related to the end-effector movements of a robot manipulator are considered and evaluated by a behavior evaluation network (BEN). A vocal cue evaluation system (VCES) is used to evaluate the vocal cues to adapt the robot´s perception by modifying the BEN. The user´s satisfactory level for the robot´s movements is utilized to track the satisfaction of the user. A situation of cooperative rearrangement of the user´s working space is used to illustrate the proposed system by a PA-10 robot manipulator.