Understanding User Instructions by Utilizing Open Knowledge for Service Robots
This addresses the challenge of natural language understanding for service robots, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing semantic and knowledge integration methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling service robots to understand high-level natural language instructions by reducing them to low-level tasks using common verbs, and it achieved high scores in RoboCup@Home benchmark tests.
Understanding user instructions in natural language is an active research topic in AI and robotics. Typically, natural user instructions are high-level and can be reduced into low-level tasks expressed in common verbs (e.g., `take', `get', `put'). For robots understanding such instructions, one of the key challenges is to process high-level user instructions and achieve the specified tasks with robots' primitive actions. To address this, we propose novel algorithms by utilizing semantic roles of common verbs defined in semantic dictionaries and integrating multiple open knowledge to generate task plans. Specifically, we present a new method for matching and recovering semantics of user instructions and a novel task planner that exploits functional knowledge of robot's action model. To verify and evaluate our approach, we implemented a prototype system using knowledge from several open resources. Experiments on our system confirmed the correctness and efficiency of our algorithms. Notably, our system has been deployed in the KeJia robot, which participated the annual RoboCup@Home competitions in the past three years and achieved encouragingly high scores in the benchmark tests.