Using Spatial Language to Guide and Instruct Robots in Household Environments

We present an approach for enabling in-home service robots to follow natural language commands from non-expert users, with a particular focus on spatial language understanding. Specifically, we propose an extension to the semantic field model of spatial prepositions that enables the representation of dynamic spatial relations involving paths. The relevance of the proposed methodology to interactive robot learning is discussed, and the paper concludes with a description of how we plan to integrate and evaluate our proposed model with end-users.