A new human-robot interaction method using semantic symbols

As robots become more prevalent in human daily life, situations requiring interaction between humans and robots will occur more frequently. Therefore, human-robot interaction (HRI) is becoming increasingly important. Although robotics researchers have made many technical developments in their field, intuitive and easy ways for most common users to interact with robots are still lacking. This paper introduces a new approach to enhance human-robot interaction using a semantic symbol language and proposes a method to acquire the intentions of robot users. In the proposed approach, each semantic symbol represents knowledge about either the environment or an action that a robot can perform. Users'intentions are expressed by symbolized multimodal information. To interpret a users'command, a probabilistic approach is used, which is appropriate for interpreting a freestyle user expression or insufficient input information. Therefore, a first-order Markov model is constructed as a probabilistic model, and a questionnaire is conducted to obtain state transition probabilities for this Markov model. Finally, we evaluated our model to show how well it interprets users'commands.