A robotic planner that responds to natural language commands

In years to come, robots could assist human users in a variety of ways, both when they are inside their homes and in other settings. To be more intuitive, robots should be able to follow natural language commands and instructions, as this allows users to communicate with them just as they would with other humans. With this in mind, researchers at MIT's Center for Brains, Minds & Machines have recently developed a sampling-based robotic planner that can be trained to understand sequences of natural language commands. The system they developed, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, combines a deep neural network with a sampling-based planner. "It's quite important to ensure that future robots in our homes understand us, both for safety reasons and because language is the most convenient interface to ask for what you want," Andrei Barbu, one of the researchers who conducted the study, told TechXplore.