A Cognitively Motivated Route-Interface for Mobile Robot Navigation

A more natural interaction between humans and mobile robots can be achieved by bridging the gap between the format of spatial knowledge used by robots and the format of languages used by humans. This enables both sides to communicate by using shared knowledge. Spatial knowledge can be (re)presented in various ways to increase the interaction between humans and mobile robots. One effective way is to describe the route verbally to the robot. This method can permit computer language-naive users to instruct mobile robots, which understand spatial descriptions, to naturally perform complex tasks using succinct and intuitive commands. We present a spatial language to describe route-based navigation tasks for a mobile robot. The instructions of this spatial language are implemented to provide an intuitive interface with which novice users can easily and naturally describe a navigation task to a mobile robot in a miniature city or in any other indoor environment. In our system, the instructions of the processed route are analyzed to generate a symbolic representation via the instruction interpreter. The resulting symbolic representation is supplied to the robot motion planning stage as an initial path estimation of route description and it is also used to generate a topological map of the route’s environment.