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<Paper uid="A97-1002">
  <Title>Natural Language in Four Spatial Interfaces</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="10" end_page="10" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
3.4 InterROB
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> InterROB is a new project exploring the integration of spoken and gestural inputs to a pair of mobile robots with rangefinder vision capability. To date the system accepts commands only, using a 66-word speech vocabulary with an input range of about 11,000 utterances. The robots currently recognize two types of gesture: distance (hands held apart) and direction (wave left/right). Since the system does not yet query information from the robots, deictic reference must currently be resolved on the robot side rather than (as in the systems described earlier) by having NAUTILUS choose from a set of candidates provided by the application. This means that phrases like that waypoint or the waypoint over there must be assigned a special FOCAL extension (a pseudo-object called a gesture-waypoint) which is not one of the four actual waypoint objects in the closed world, whereas with query capability NAUTILUS might be able to obtain enough information from the robot to determine which of the four actual waypoints is being gestured toward.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Another goal in InterROB is to go beyond the usual restriction of deictic reference to demonstrative or indexical references (that, here, there) and allow gestures to accompany any sort of definite or indefinite NP. This could then be extended to include extralinguistic context in general, such as interpreting the waypoint to mean the one the robot is currently facing, or my right to mean 90 degrees perpendicular to the way the robot perceives the operator to be facing. We also plan to extend the robotic vision capabilities with additional hard/software to allow visual object recognition for lexical acquisition.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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