KANTRA - A Natural Language Interface for Intelligent Robots

The future use of advanced technical systems, for example robots in the area of service and maintenance, will lead to high demands for interaction between man-machine andmachine-man to make these systems more easily accessible for human operators. On that account, natural language could be an efficient means to use robots in a more flexible manner. First, it is possible to convey information in a varying degree of condensation, on the other hand, communication can be performed on different levels of abstraction in an application-specific way. In order to fully exploit the capabilities of a natural language access, a dialogue-based approach will be used. In this article, wewant to report about the joint efforts of theUniversity of Karlsruhe and the University of the Saarland in providing natural language access to the autonomous mobile two-arm robot KAMRO which is being developed at IPR. A closer view at the description of the interface architecture will be given. It is documented how the integration of the man-machine interface into the control architecture of the robot should be performed in order to supply access to all internal information and models that are necessary for an autonomous behaviour.