Introduction to the Special Issue on Dialog with Robots

In parallel with these efforts, significant advances have also been made in robotics. Innovations in sensing, reasoning, and manipulation have allowed autonomous robots to move beyond the walls of computing labs into the workplace, home, and street. Bringing robots into real-world environments has made it clear to researchers that robots need not only accurately navigate and manipulate objects, but also to work alongside and, ultimately, interact and collaborate with humans. Subsequently, efforts at the intersection of spoken dialogue and human-robot interaction (HRI) have sought to broaden studies of spoken dialogue to richer, more natural, physically situated settings, and have brought to the fore the rich research area of situated dialogue, focused on challenges and opportunities at the intersection of natural language, robotics, and commonsense reasoning. Projects in this realm have addressed challenges with the use of dialogue as enabling coordination among multiple actors, taking into consideration not only the details of the task at hand, but also the dynamic physical and social context in which the actors are immersed and the affordances that embodiment provides. This special issue of AI Magazine on dialogue with robots brings together a collection of articles on situated dialogue.