Physical Constraints on Human Robot Interaction

Abstract

This paper conducts an experiment to investi-gate the effect of a physical constraint on a sub-ject's viewpoint when using spoken language to navigate a robot. In addition, a robot naviga-tion environment named Spondia-II has been developed for the experiment with an actual au-tonomous mobile robot. It is well known that the meaning of an utterance, such as a demon-strative pronoun, depends on the viewpoint of the speaker or the hearer. In a conversation be-tween people, the primary factor in determin-ing viewpoint is the physical constraints that are mediated by their body movements. This paper notes that these physical constraints also have an effect on viewpoint even when peo-ple instruct a robot. Furthermore, it is argued that, the utterance process also would greatly improve if the robot were able to comprehend the constraints. 1