Demonstration of a Spoken Dialogue Interface for Planning Activities of a Semi-autonomous Robot

Planning and scheduling in the face of uncertainty and change pushes the capabilities of both planning and dialogue technologies by requiring complex negotiation to arrive at a workable plan. Planning for use of semi-autonomous robots involves negotiation among multiple participants with competing scientific and engineering goals to co-construct a complex plan. In NASA applications this plan construction is done under severe time pressure so having a dialogue interface to the plan construction tools can aid rapid completion of the process. But, this will put significant demands on spoken dialogue technology, particularly in the areas of dialogue management and generation. The dialogue interface will need to be able to handle the complex dialogue strategies that occur in negotiation dialogues, including hypotheticals and revisions, and the generation component will require an ability to summarize complex plans. This demonstration will describe a work in progress towards building a spoken dialogue interface to the EUROPA planner for the purposes of planning and scheduling the activities of a semi-autonomous robot. A prototype interface has been built for planning the schedule of the Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA), a mobile robot designed for micro-gravity environments that is intended for use on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. The spoken dialogue interface gives the user the capability to ask for a description of the plan, ask specific questions about the plan, and update or modify the plan. We anticipate that a spoken dialogue interface to the planner will provide a natural augmentation or alternative to the visualization interface, in situations in which the user needs very targeted information about the plan, in situations where natural language can express complex ideas more concisely than GUI actions, or in situations in which a graphical user interface is not appropriate.