On Grounding Symbols for Robots

The failure of classical AI in delivering intelligent robots has forced many researchers to address the Symbol Grounding Problem (SGP) seriously. In this paper we present a methodology to solve this problem by facilitating a human instructor to interact with a robot using a Microsoft Kinect^™ sensor so as to ground symbols. The instructor exhibits the physical objects or actions and also provides the corresponding symbols using speech to a robot which in turn uses and elaborates its own semantics for the symbol autonomously and grounds the same within. Grounding is achieved by toiling on sensory information while symbol theft enables the grounding of meta-level symbols or aliases. Apart from the description of the inherent grounding mechanism, the paper also discusses the results obtained from actual experiments that eventually make the robot identify and point to the concerned physical objects or perform the actions.