Interpreting fuzzy linguistic information in user commands by analyzing movement restrictions in the surrounding environment

Assistive robots for elderly and disabled people are being developed to uplift the living standard of the people. The idea of realizing the dream for a robot assistant obviously depends on the availability of human-human like interactions in human-robot interactions also. Humans prefer to use voice instructions, which have uncertain information such as “very little”, “far” etc. in their daily interactions. Therefore, the ability of a robot assistant to understand the uncertain information is crucial. Therefore, our study proposes a method to interpret fuzzy linguistic information related to distance in user commands by evaluating the spatial information of the surrounding environment. Fuzzy logic based fuzzy linguistic information evaluation system (FLIES) has been introduced to interpret the fuzzy linguistic terms in user commands by analyzing possible movement restrictions in the surrounding environment. The proposed method has been implemented and tested on a Pioneer 3DX mobile robot. The experiment has been conducted in two different indoor environments and the experimental results of the system are presented.