Bot Language (Summary Technical Report, Oct 2016–Sep 2021)

Author(s):

Matthew Marge, Claire Bonial, Stephanie Lukin, and Clare Voss

Abstract:

This report provides a comprehensive summary of the contributions made as part of the Bot Language project, a 5-year US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory-led initiative in partnership with researchers at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies and Carnegie Mellon University. In particular, this report describes accomplishments funded under the project “Naturalistic Behavior for Shared Understanding and Explanation with Intelligent Systems.” The goal of this research was to provide more natural ways for people to communicate with robots using language. Our vision was to enable robots to engage in a back-and-forth dialogue with human teammates where robots can provide status updates and ask for clarification where appropriate. To this end, we conducted a phased progression of four experiments where human participants were giving navigation instructions to a remotely located robot, while the robot’s dialogue and navigation processes were initially controlled by human experimenters. Over the course of the experiments, automation was progressively introduced until dialogue processing was completely driven by a classifier trained on the data collected in previous experiments.