Modeling dynamic spatial relations with global properties for natural language-based human-robot interaction

We present a methodology for the representation of dynamic spatial relations (DSRs) with global properties as part of an approach for enabling robots to follow natural language commands from non-expert users, with particular focus on the development of spatial language primitives. Our approach to modeling DSRs is based on related research in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience, and contributes novel extensions to the semantic field model of spatial prepositions. We describe novel representations of the DSRs for “to”, “through”, and “around”, discuss their applicability in path classification scenarios, and provide implementation details of path generation routines instantiating these DSRs for use in robot task planning. The paper concludes with an evaluation of our robot architecture implemented on a simulated mobile robot in a 2D home environment.