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In conversation, people often use spatial relationships to describe their environment, e.g., "There is a desk in front of me and a doorway behind it", and to issue directives, e.g., "Go around the desk and through the doorway." In our research, we have been investigating the use of spatial relationships to establish a natural communication mechanism between people and robots, in particular, for novice users. In this paper, the work on robot spatial relationships is combined with a multi-modal robot interface. We show how linguistic spatial descriptions and other spatial information can be extracted from an evidence grid map and how this information can be used in a natural, human-robot dialog. Examples using spatial language are included for both robot-to-human feedback and also human-to-robot commands. We also discuss some linguistic consequences in the semantic representations of spatial and locative information based on this work., The original document contains color images. Prepared in collaboration with University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MD 65211. Pub. in IEEE Transactions on SMC, Part C, Special Issue on Human-Robot Interaction, July 2002. Sponsored in part by DARPA and NRL.

In their research on intuitive means for humans and intelligent, mobile robots to collaborate, the authors use a multimodal interface that supports speech and gestural inputs. As a preliminary step to evaluate their approach and to identify practical areas for future work, they conducted a Wizard-of-Oz pilot study with five participants who each collaborated with a robot on a search task in a separate room. The goal was to find a sign in the robot's environment with the word "FOO" printed on it. Using a subset of their multimodal interface, participants were told to direct the collaboration. As their subordinate, the robot would understand their utterances and gestures, and recognize objects and structures in the search space. Participants conversed with the robot through a wireless microphone and headphone and, for gestural input, used a touch screen displaying alternative views of the robot's environment to indicate locations and objects., Prepared in collaboration with the University of Missouri-Columbia, Computer Engineering and Computer Science Department, Columbia, MO. Sponsored in part by DARPA. The original document contains color images.