Interaction awareness for joint environment exploration

<p>An important goal for research on service robotsis the cooperation of a human and a robot as team. Aservice robot in a domestic environment needs to build arepresentation of its future workspace that corresponds tothe human user's understanding of these surroundings. Butit also needs to apply this model about the where andwhat in its current interaction to allow communication aboutobjects and places in a human-adequate way. In this paperwe present the integration of a hierarchical robotic mappingsystem into an interactive framework controlled by a dialogsystem. The goal is to use interactively acquired environmentmodels to implement a robot with interaction aware behaviors.A major contribution of this work is a three-level hierarchy ofspatial representation affecting three different communicationdimensions. This hierarchy is consequently applied in the designof the grounding-based dialog, laser-based topological mapping,and an objects attention system. We demonstrate the benefitsof this integration for learning and tour guiding in a humancomprehensibleinteraction between a robot and its user ina home-tour scenario. The enhanced interaction capabilitiesare crucial for developing a new generation of robots thatwill be accepted not only as service robots but also as robotcompanions.</p>