HCC: Small: Human-Driven Spatial Language for Human-Robot Interaction

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When people communicate with each other about spatially oriented tasks, they more often use qualitative spatial references (such as "behind" in the spatial description "Your eyeglasses are behind the lamp.") rather than precise quantitative terms. Although natural for people, such qualitative references are problematic for robots that "think" in terms of mathematical expressions and numbers. Yet, providing robots with the ability to understand and communicate with these spatial references has great potential for creating a more natural interface mechanism for robot users. This would allow users to interact with a robot much as they would with another human, and is especially critical if robots are to provide assistive capabilities in unstructured environments occupied by people. This project will do the following: empirically capture and characterize the key components of spatial descriptions that indicate the location of a target object in a 3D immersive task embedded in an eldercare scenario; develop and refine algorithms that enable the robot to produce and comprehend descriptions containing these empirically determined key components within this scenario; and assess and validate the robot spatial language algorithm in virtual and physical environments. This project will train graduate students in an interdisciplinary setting that encompasses psychology, computer science and engineering), and will directly involve undergraduate students in the robotics work at Missouri and in the human subject experimentation work at Notre Dame. This project will lead to a better understanding of how robots can and should be used for this class of assistive tasks in an eldercare scenario.