Understanding Natural Language Commands for Robotic Navigation and Mobile Manipulation

This paper describes a new model for understanding natural language commands given to autonomous systems that perform navigation and mobile manipulation in semi-structured environments. Previous approaches have used models with fixed structure to infer the likelihood of a sequence of actions given the environment and the command. In contrast, our framework, called Generalized Grounding Graphs (G3 ), dynamically instantiates a probabilistic graphical model for a particular natural language command according to the command’s hierarchical and compositional semantic structure. Our system performs inference in the model to successfully find and execute plans corresponding to natural language commands such as “Put the tire pallet on the truck.” The model is trained using a corpus of commands collected using crowdsourcing. We pair each command with robot actions and use the corpus to learn the parameters of the model. We evaluate the robot’s performance by inferring plans from natu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Stefanie Tellex, Thomas Kollar, Steven Dickerson, Matthew R. Walter, Ashis Gopal Banerjee, Seth J. Teller, Nicholas Roy
• Keywords: AAAI 2011, Intelligent Agents, Mobile Manipulation, Natural Language Command, Robot Simulator