Testing an assistive fetch robot with spatial language from older and younger adults

Methods and experimental results are presented for interpreting 3D spatial language descriptions used for human to robot communication in a fetch task. The work is based on human subject experiments in which spatial language descriptions were logged from younger and older adult participants. A spatial language model is proposed, and methods are presented for translating natural spatial language descriptions into robot commands that allow the robot to find the requested object. Robot command representation and robot behavior are also discussed. Experimental results compare path metrics of the robot system and human subjects in a common simulation environment. The overall success rate of the robot trials is 85%.