Verbal Programming of Robot Behavior

Home robots may come with many sophisticated built-in abilities, however there will always be a degree of customization needed for each user and environment. Ideally this should be accomplished through one-shot learning, as collecting the large number of examples needed for statistical inference is tedious. A particularly appealing approach is to simply explain to the robot, via speech, what it should be doing. In this paper we describe the ALIA cognitive architecture that is able to effectively incorporate user-supplied advice and prohibitions in this manner. The functioning of the implemented system on a small robot is illustrated by an associated video [11]. 1 INTRODUCTION A typical home robot of the future might have built-in navigation, object recognition, task planning, and dexterous manipulation. Y et, despite these sophisticated capabilities, there are still things it cannot know when it first arrives. For instance, what a particular room in the house is called, even if it can identify the general type.