Deb Roy, Kai-yuh Hsiao, Nikolaos Mavridis

Abstract

How can we build robots that engage in fluid spoken conversations with people, moving beyond canned responses to words and towards actually understanding? As a step towards addressing this question, we introduce a robotic architecture that provides a basis for grounding word meanings. The architecture provides perceptual, procedural, and affordance representations for grounding words. A perceptuallycoupled on-line simulator enables sensorymotor representations that can shift points of view. Held together, we show that this architecture provides a rich set of data structures and procedures that provide the foundations for grounding the meaning of certain classes of words.