Your instruction may be crisp, but not clear to me!

Abstract

The number of robots deployed in our daily surroundings is ever-increasing. Even in the industrial setup, the use of coworker robots is increasing rapidly. These cohabitant robots perform various tasks as instructed by co-located human beings. Thus, a natural interaction mechanism plays a big role in the usability and acceptability of the robot, especially by a non-expert user. The recent development in natural language processing (NLP) has paved the way for chatbots to generate an automatic response for users’ query. A robot can be equipped with such a dialogue system. However, the goal of human-robot interaction is not focused on generating a response to queries, but it often involves performing some tasks in the physical world. Thus, a system is required that can detect user intended task from the natural instruction along with the set of pre- and post-conditions. In this work, we develop a dialogue engine for a robot that can classify and map a task instruction to the robot’s capability. If there is some ambiguity in the instructions or some required information is missing, which is often the case in natural conversation, it asks an appropriate question(s) to resolve it. The goal is to generate minimal and pin-pointed queries for the user to resolve an ambiguity. We evaluate our system for a telepresence scenario where a remote user instructs the robot for various tasks. Our study based on 12 individuals shows that the proposed dialogue strategy can help a novice user to effectively interact with a robot, leading to satisfactory user experience.