Talking robots with Lego MindStorms

Talking Robots With LEGO MindStorms Alexander Koller Saarland University Saarbr¨ucken, Germany koller@coli.uni-sb.de Geert-Jan M. Kruijff Saarland University Saarbr¨ucken, Germany gj@coli.uni-sb.de Abstract This paper shows how talking robots can be built from off-the-shelf components, based on the Lego MindStorms robotics platform. We present four robots that students created as final projects in a seminar we supervised. Because Lego robots are so affordable, we argue that it is now feasible for any dialogue researcher to tackle the interesting chal- lenges at the robot-dialogue interface. 1 Introduction Ever since Karel ˇCapek introduced the word “robot” in his 1921 novel Rossum’s Universal Robots and the subsequent popularisation through Issac Asi- mov’s books, the idea of building autonomous robots has captured people’s imagination. The cre- ation of an intelligent, talking robot has been the ul- timate dream of Artificial Intelligence from the very start. Yet, although there has been a tremendous amount of AI research on topics such as control and navigation for robots, the issue of integrat- ing dialogue capabilities into a robot has only re- cently started to receive attention. Early successes were booked with Flakey (Konolige et al., 1993), a voice-controlled robot which roamed the corri- dors of SRI. Since then, the field of socially in- teractive robots has established itself (see (Fong et al., 2003)). Often-cited examples of such inter- active robots that have a capability of communi- cating in natural language are the humanoid robot ROBOVIE (Kanda et al., 2002) and robotic mu- seum tour guides like RHINO (Burgard et al., 1999) (Deutsches Museum Bonn), its successor MINERVA touring the Smithsonian in Washington (Thrun et al., 2000), and ROBOX at the Swiss National Ex- hibition Expo02 (Siegwart and et al, 2003). How- ever, dialogue systems used in robotics appear to be mostly restricted to relatively simple finite-state, query/response interaction. The only robots in- volving dialogue systems that are state-of-the-art in computational linguistics (and that we are aware of) are those presented by Lemon et al. (2001), Sidner et al. (2003) and Bos et al. (2003), who equipped a mobile robot with an information state based dia- logue system. There are two obvious reasons for this gap be- tween research on dialogue systems in robotics on the one hand, and computational linguistics on the other hand. One is that the sheer cost involved in buying or building a robot makes traditional robotics research available to only a handful of re- search sites. Another is that building a talking robot combines the challenges presented by robotics and natural language processing, which are further ex- acerbated by the interactions of the two sides. In this paper, we address at least the first prob- lem by demonstrating how to build talking robots from affordable, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. We present an approach, tested in a seminar taught at the Saarland University in Win- ter 2002/2003, in which we combine the Lego MindStorms system with COTS software for speech recognition/synthesis and dialogue modeling. The Lego MindStorms1 system extends the tra- ditional Lego bricks with a …

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