Using Spatial Language in a Human-Robot Dialog

In conversation, people often use spatial relationships to describe their environment, e.g., “There is a desk in front of me and a doorway behind it”, and to issue directives, e.g., “Go around the desk and through the doorway.” In our research, we have been investigating the use of spatial relationships to establish a natural communication mechanism between people and robots, in particular, for novice users. In this paper, the work on robot spatial relationships is combined with a multimodal robot interface developed at the Naval Research Lab. We show how linguistic spatial descriptions and other spatial information can be extracted from an evidence grid map and how this information can be used in a natural, human-robot dialog.