Understanding uncertain information in vocal description for creating virtual spatial maps

• Main Authors: Bandara H. M. Ravindu T., Muthugala M. A. Viraj J., Jayasekara A. G. Buddhika P., Chandima D. P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2019-12-01
• Series: Paladyn: Journal of Behavioral Robotics
• Subjects: uncertain information; virtual spatial maps; assistive robotics
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/pjbr-2019-0032

Assistive robots are developed for supporting daily activities of elderly people to uplift the living standards. The assistive robots should be friendly, reliable, active, and comprehensible in order to satisfy the needs of elderly population. Human activities are frequently related to navigational tasks and human tend to use descriptions which include natural language phrases and uncertain terms such as “near”, “little”, “far”, “small”, “large”, “close”to describe about spatial information. Therefore assistive robots should be capable of analysing and understanding descriptions which contain natural language phrases with uncertain terms and creating a conceptual map for effective navigation. This paper proposes a method to understand spatial information in a description with uncertain terms and creates a conceptual map in a robot memory which can be linked with spatial map for purposeful, effective and human friendly navigation task. Human studies have been carried out to study different types of descriptions related to navigation tasks. The Virtual Spatial Data Identifier (VSDI) and Uncertain Term Identifier (UTI) modules have been introduced in order to evaluate the spatial information in description to create a virtual map. Results of the system have been compared with the results of a human study in order to evaluate performance of the proposed system.