End-user programming of a social robot by dialog

One of the main challenges faced by social robots is how to provide intuitive, natural and enjoyable usability for the end-user. In our ordinary environment, social robots could be important tools for education and entertainment (edutainment) in a variety of ways. This paper presents a Natural Progr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Robotics and autonomous systems Vol. 59; no. 12; pp. 1102 - 1114
Main Authors: Gorostiza, Javi F., Salichs, Miguel A.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier B.V 01.12.2011
Subjects:
Construction
Dialog manager system
Education
End users
Games
Human–robot dialogs
Instruction-based learning
Natural programming
Petri nets
Platforms
Programming
Robots
Semantic grammars
Sequence function charts
Skills
Social robotics
Instruction-based learning
Dialog manager system
Petri nets
Natural programming
Sequence function charts
Human–robot dialogs
Social robotics
Semantic grammars
ISSN:0921-8890, 1872-793X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:One of the main challenges faced by social robots is how to provide intuitive, natural and enjoyable usability for the end-user. In our ordinary environment, social robots could be important tools for education and entertainment (edutainment) in a variety of ways. This paper presents a Natural Programming System (NPS) that is geared to non-expert users. The main goal of such a system is to provide an enjoyable interactive platform for the users to build different programs within their social robot platform. The end-user can build a complex net of actions and conditions (a sequence) in a social robot via mixed-initiative dialogs and multimodal interaction. The system has been implemented and tested in Maggie, a real social robot with multiple skills, conceived as a general HRI researching platform. The robot’s internal features (skills) have been implemented to be verbally accessible to the end-user, who can combine them into others that are more complex following a bottom-up model. The built sequence is internally implemented as a Sequence Function Chart (SFC), which allows parallel execution, modularity and re-use. A multimodal Dialog Manager System (DMS) takes charge of keeping the coherence of the interaction. This work is thought for bringing social robots closer to non-expert users, who can play the game of “teaching how to do things” with the robot. ► A Natural Programming System (NPS) has been implemented in a real Social Robot. ► End-users can edit new skills as Sequence Function Charts (SFC) verbally at runtime. ► NPS uses a frame-based Dialog System in VoiceXML with a multimodal extension. ► We have done some first tests with end-users showing some qualitative results.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
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ISSN:0921-8890
1872-793X
DOI:10.1016/j.robot.2011.07.009