An interactive approach for situated task specification through verbal instructions

The ability to specify a task without having to write special software is an important and prominent feature for a mo-bile service robot deployed in a crowded office environment, working around and interacting with people. In this paper, we contribute an interactive approach for enabling the users to instruct tasks to a mobile service robot through verbal commands. The input is given as typed or spoken instruc-tions, which are then mapped to the available sensing and actuation primitives on the robot. The main contributions of this work are the addition of conditionals on sensory infor-mation that the specified actions to be executed in a closed-loop manner, and a correction mode that allows an existing task to be modified or corrected at a later time by providing a replacement action during the test execution. We describe all the components of our approach along with the imple-mentation details and illustrative examples in depth. We also discuss the extensibility of the presented approach, and point out potential future extensions.