Humanoid Robot Interactions by Motion Description Language and Dialogue

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a system for facilitating humanoid robots to acquire sequence of movements by motion description and dialogue. The unique feature of our system is that we define a descriptive language and framework that allows the specification of humanoid motions and the representation of motor skills. We subsequently developed and tested a virtual reality simulation system that can execute the motion descriptive language. We then extended the system to allow humanoid robots to acquire motion descriptions through conversing with human. We implemented and tested the proposed system on the NAO humanoid robot. Our implementation includes a dialogue module that continues to update the encoded motion descriptions as the conversation advances and an action module that retrieves the acquired motion descriptions and direct the robot to perform the specified tasks. 