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<Paper uid="C04-1049">
  <Title>Talking Robots With LEGO MindStorms</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Ever since Karel VCapek introduced the word &amp;quot;robot&amp;quot; in his 1921 novel Rossum's Universal Robots and the subsequent popularisation through Issac Asimov's books, the idea of building autonomous robots has captured people's imagination. The creation of an intelligent, talking robot has been the ultimate dream of Artificial Intelligence from the very start.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Yet, although there has been a tremendous amount of AI research on topics such as control and navigation for robots, the issue of integrating dialogue capabilities into a robot has only recently started to receive attention. Early successes were booked with Flakey (Konolige et al., 1993), a voice-controlled robot which roamed the corridors of SRI. Since then, the field of socially interactive robots has established itself (see (Fong et al., 2003)). Often-cited examples of such interactive robots that have a capability of communicating in natural language are the humanoid robot ROBOVIE (Kanda et al., 2002) and robotic museum tour guides like RHINO (Burgard et al., 1999) (Deutsches Museum Bonn), its successor MINERVA touring the Smithsonian in Washington (Thrun et al., 2000), and ROBOX at the Swiss National Exhibition Expo02 (Siegwart and et al, 2003). However, dialogue systems used in robotics appear to be mostly restricted to relatively simple finite-state, query/response interaction. The only robots involving dialogue systems that are state-of-the-art in computational linguistics (and that we are aware of) are those presented by Lemon et al. (2001), Sidner et al. (2003) and Bos et al. (2003), who equipped a mobile robot with an information state based dialogue system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> There are two obvious reasons for this gap between research on dialogue systems in robotics on the one hand, and computational linguistics on the other hand. One is that the sheer cost involved in buying or building a robot makes traditional robotics research available to only a handful of research sites. Another is that building a talking robot combines the challenges presented by robotics and natural language processing, which are further exacerbated by the interactions of the two sides.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In this paper, we address at least the first problem by demonstrating how to build talking robots from affordable, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. We present an approach, tested in a seminar taught at the Saarland University in Winter 2002/2003, in which we combine the Lego MindStorms system with COTS software for speech recognition/synthesis and dialogue modeling.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The Lego MindStorms1 system extends the traditional Lego bricks with a central control unit (the RCX), as well as motors and various kinds of sensors. It provides a severely limited computational platform from a traditional robotics point of view, but comes at a price of a few hundred, rather than tens of thousands of Euros per kit. Because MindStorms robots can be flexibly connected to a dialogue system running on a PC, this means that affordable robots are now available to dialogue researchers. null We present four systems that were built by teams of three students each under our supervision, and use off-the-shelf components such as the MindStorms kits, a dialogue system, and a speech recogniser and synthesis system, in addition to communications software that we ourselves wrote to link all the components together. It turns out that using</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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