Natural Programming of a Social Robot by Dialogs

This paper aims at bringing social robots closer to naive users. A Natural Programming System that allows the end-user to give instructions to a Social Robot has been developed. The instructions derive in a sequence of actions and conditions, that can be executed while the own sequence verbal edition continues. A Dialogue Manager System (DMS) has been developed in a Social Robot. The dialog is described in a voiceXML structure, where a set of information slots is defined. These slots are related to the necessary attributes for the construction of the sequence in execution time. The robot can make specific requests on encountering unfilled slots. Temporal aspects of dialog such as barge-in property, mixed-initiative, or speech intonation control are also considered. Dialog flow is based on Dialog Acts. The dialog specification has also been extended for multimodality management. The presented DMS has been used as a part of a Natural Programming System but can also be used for other multimodal humanrobot interactive skills.