Human-robot interaction with minimal spanning natural language template for autonomous and tele-operated control

Interaction between robots and humans should be at a level which is accessible and natural for human operators. A lexicon template is proposed for specifying commands for 2D mobile robot navigational tasks. The language lexicon is a minimal spanning semantic set for human 2D navigational tasks. The task command lexicon consists of a verb, destination, direction and a speed. The destination is a location in the environment defined by a geometric model positioned at a particular spatial location in a globally-referenced Cartesian coordinate space. The task command lexicon has been used as a language template for specifying commands for the SPOTT mobile robot control architecture. It is not the intent that the template serve as the only commands that the robot recognizes, but rather as an internal language that gets mapped onto planning and control constructs. A speech recognition system maps spoken commands onto the proposed internal natural language command template.