Abstract:
As robots enter the human environment and come in contact with inexperienced users, they need to be able to interact with users in a multi-modal fashion keyboard and mouse is no longer acceptable as the only input modalities. Humans should be able to communicate with robots using methods as similar as possible to the concise, rich, and diverse means they use to communicate with one another.
The framework is demonstrated by interactively controlling and programming a vacuum-cleaning robot. The demonstrations are used to exemplify the interactive programming and the plan recognition aspect of the research. The key contributions of this thesis are the introduction and implementation of the novel programming approach. It is expected to improve significantly the state-of-the-art in robot programming and interactive personal robotics