Situated dialogue for human-robot teaming in Urban Search & Rescue missions

The talk will highlight issues in processing situated dialogue in human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on the interaction in a human-robot team in Urban Search and Rescue Missions. In such a context, we see human-robot interaction as part of a larger collaborative activity. The humans and the robots are engaged in a form of joint activity, and dialogue as (inter)action is part of that. This makes utterance meaning more than “just content.” A robot needs to figure out what the utterance refers to, what new information it provides — but also, why somebody said it, and how the robot is supposed to act upon it.

Processing and managing dialogue therefore need to be integrated with a model of what the robot thinks about the environment, what it intends to do — and what it believes about others and their intentions. This is challenging. The robot only ever has an incomplete and relatively uncertain model of the world, and of others acting in there. Moreover, the content in this model changes over time, to match the dynamics of the environment and the actions performed therein. The talk discusses how we can make it possible for the robot to build up such models, and then use them in different kinds of processing like planning, dialogue, and reasoning.

Bio:
Dr. Geert-Jan Kruijff graduated as an engineer of the University of Twente combining Computer Science and analytical Philosophy. Because of his interest in computational linguistics and dialogue systems, he ended up in Prague doing a PhD in mathematical linguistics, finishing in 2001. While in Prague, he also spent two years in Edinburgh, doing a lot of work on categorial grammar and description logic-like semantics.
From 2001 until 2004 Geert-Jan worked at the Department of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University, working on grammar formalisms and building LEGO robots. In late 2004 he turned building talking robots into a full-time job at DFKI GmbH, leading several international projects. Their Talking Robots group is now about 14 people strong, plus MSc students. Since early 2010 he is the coordinator for a large international project on HRI and urban search & rescue.