Mixed-Initiative Long-Term Interactions with an All-Day-Companion Robot

As robots become incorporated into our environments, they must be equipped with the ability to communicate effectively with us. In particular, robots that perform longer tasks for a small set of people (e.g., a companion robot to escort visitors to meetings all day) need to be able to start and maintain interesting and relevant dialog with any and all humans involved. In this work, we present our ongoing work on our robot, CoBot, which is assigned an all-day task to escort a visitor around our building and perform tasks for her. We first describe CoBot’s dialog manager which is responsible for the task-oriented dialog, including dialog to meet the visitor’s needs, CoBot’s notifications of interesting locations around the building, and the robot’s own requests for help. We, then, focus two aspects of the dialog manager: 1) how CoBot can invoke more accurate answers to its requests for help from the visitor and 2) how to reduce repetitive dialog which can happen during all-day interactions. We provide an example dialog between CoBot and a visitor to illustrate the dialog manager’s capabilities.