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

当人们就空间导向的任务进行交流时，他们通常会使用定性的空间参考（例如在空间描述“你的眼镜在灯后面”中使用“后面”）。而不是精确的定量术语。虽然这种定性参考对人来说很自然，但对于用数学表达式和数字“思考”的机器人来说是有问题的。然而，为机器人提供理解和沟通这些空间参考的能力，为机器人用户创造更自然的界面机制具有巨大的潜力。这将允许用户与机器人互动，就像他们与另一个人一样，如果机器人要在人类占据的非结构化环境中提供辅助能力，这一点尤为重要。该项目将做以下工作：经验地捕获和表征空间描述的关键组成部分，这些空间描述表明了嵌入在老年人护理场景中的3D沉浸式任务中目标物体的位置；开发和改进算法，使机器人能够产生和理解包含这些经验确定的关键组件的描述；并在虚拟和物理环境中对机器人空间语言算法进行了评估和验证。该项目将在跨学科环境（包括心理学、计算机科学和工程学）中培养研究生，并将直接让本科生参与密苏里大学的机器人工作和圣母大学的人体实验工作。这个项目将使人们更好地理解机器人如何能够和应该在老年人护理场景中用于这类辅助任务。

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.