title: Strategies for human-driven robot comprehension of spatial descriptions by older adults in a robot fetch task.
abstract: This contribution presents a corpus of spatial descriptions and describes the development of a human-driven spatial language robot system for their comprehension. The domain of application is an eldercare setting in which an assistive robot is asked to "fetch" an object for an elderly resident based on a natural language spatial description given by the resident. In Part One, we describe a corpus of naturally occurring descriptions elicited from a group of older adults within a virtual 3D home that simulates the eldercare setting. We contrast descriptions elicited when participants offered descriptions to a human versus robot avatar, and under instructions to tell the addressee how to find the target versus where the target is. We summarize the key features of the spatial descriptions, including their dynamic versus static nature and the perspective adopted by the speaker. In Part Two, we discuss critical cognitive and perceptual processing capabilities necessary for the robot to establish a common ground with the human user and perform the "fetch" task. Based on the collected corpus, we focus here on resolving the perspective ambiguity and recognizing furniture items used as landmarks in the descriptions. Taken together, the work presented here offers the key building blocks of a robust system that takes as input natural spatial language descriptions and produces commands that drive the robot to successfully fetch objects within our eldercare scenario.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Carlson
authors.forename: Marjorie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Skubic
authors.forename: Jared
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Zhiyu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Huo
authors.forename: Tatiana
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Alexenko
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012371:Robotics; D065855:Spatial Processing; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: Assistive robotics; Eldercare; Fetch task; Human-robot interaction; Spatial descriptions; Spatial language; Task instructions