Understanding Spatial Concepts by Exploiting Interaction Patterns⋆

During the last years approaches to ”interactive mapping” or ”Human Augmented Mapping” with and for service robots have become of increasing interest both for robotic mapping methods and for the investigation of Human Robot Interaction. The underlying idea is to take a robot on a guided tour and explain the surroundings to it. This guided tour rises questions both regarding the technological development and the cognition and interaction part of the tour. Several approaches have been reported to ”interactive” or ”semantic” mapping, including also works related to the representation of space that could be suitable for an interactively controlled robotic mapping process [1–3]. There is an abundance of publications to be found regarding the actual representation(s) of space used by humans in different contexts, hence the most relevant ones are those considering the description of space that humans give in an interaction and that they can remember [4, 5]. Also particular aspects of the interaction with service robots or robot companions have been investigated in user studies [6] (as example), partly conducted in ”home-like” laboratory environments and ”laboratory apartments”. However, with the respective systems still being subject to research and development, it has become of interest to investigate how people actually present their own home or other familiar environments to a mobile robot to draw conclusions on the system requirements for further development. This paper describes observations that have been part of the analysis of a respective study in people’s homes, aiming to find a way to improve the general understanding of a given situation for a service robot. A previously introduced respective framework [7] proposes a cognitively inspired generic environment model based on hierarchically structured (spatial) concepts. This model links human and robotic environment representations, so that communication about the environment is facilitated and can then also be used to improve the robot’s understanding of its surroundings. So far the model incorporates regions (delimited areas, typically corresponding to rooms), locations (workspaces, defined by large, rather stationary objects, e.g., a fridge or a coffee-maker) and objects (small items that can be manipulated and are not stationary, e.g., cups or books). During a guided tour different types of ambiguities can arise, one of which occurs when the corresponding concept for a given label is not known, or, even