Grounding the Interaction: Anchoring Situated Discourse in Everyday Human-Robot Interaction

This paper presents how extraction, representation and use of symbolic knowledge from real-world perception and human-robot verbal and non-verbal interaction can actually enable a grounded and shared model of the world that is suitable for later high-level tasks such as dialogue understanding. We show how the anchoring process itself relies on the situated nature of human-robot interactions. We present an integrated approach, including a specialized symbolic knowledge representation system based on Description Logics, and case studies on several robotic platforms that demonstrate these cognitive capabilities.