Human-robot Interaction Based on Spoken Natural Language Dialogue

We report on recent work on human-robot spoken dialogue interaction in the context of Hygeiorobot, a project that aims to build a mobile robotic assistant for hospitals. Spoken dialogue systems are particularly suitable to this context, as the robot does not carry a keyboard or other common interaction devices, and is intended to be used by people with little or no computing experience. In this paper, we concentrate on dialogue management issues. After providing a brief survey of dialogue management techniques, we focus on particular issues that need to be addressed in human-robot interaction, and the considerations that influenced the design of Hygeiorobot’s dialogue manager. We then describe in detail the spoken dialogue capabilities of Hygeiorobot’s current demonstrator and the tasks that the demonstrator can perform, concluding with plans for future work.