Improving grounded natural language understanding through human-robot dialog

Jesse Thomason, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Jivko Sinapov, Nick Walker, Yuqian Jiang, Harel Yedidsion, Justin Hart, Peter Stone, Raymond J. Mooney

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

42 Scopus citations

Abstract

Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language humans use to issue such commands, and connect concept words like red can to physical object properties. One way to alleviate this engineering for a new domain is to enable robots in human environments to adapt dynamically - continually learning new language constructions and perceptual concepts. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline for translating natural language commands to discrete robot actions, and use clarification dialogs to jointly improve language parsing and concept grounding. We train and evaluate this agent in a virtual setting on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and we transfer the learned agent to a physical robot platform to demonstrate it in the real world.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2019
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Pages6934-6941
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781538660263
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 May 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 20 May 201924 May 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Volume2019-May
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period20/05/1924/05/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Artificial Intelligence

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