Dialogue in situated environments: A symbolic approach to perspective-aware grounding, clarification and reasoning for robot

Interacting with a robot in a shared space requires not only a shared model (i.e., environment entities must be described with the same symbols), but also a model of mutual knowledge: both the robot and the human need to figure out what the other knows, sees or can do in the environment to appropriately behave. We present here our efforts to let the robot grounds verbal interaction with a human in a physical, situated environment. We propose a knowledge-oriented architecture, where perceptions from different point of views (from the robot itself, from the human, etc.) are turned into symbolic facts that are stored in different cognitive models and reused in a newly designed module for dialogue grounding.