Identifying Spatial Terminology and Boundaries for Human Robot Interaction: A Human Study

Service robots have been widely adopted to the domestic environment over the past few years. Pertaining to this sudden growth, a high interest has been exerted upon the service robots deployed in the domestic circle. The domestic users are not overly cohabitated with technology and use natural language habitually in their daily tasks. Instead of a set of machine specific instructions, natural language contains spatial terms with ambiguous meaning which gets altered depending on the environment and users themselves. Therefore the competence of the robot to understand and interpret the natural language instructions used by humans becomes a fact of substantial importance in the domestic environment. This paper contributes in a human study which helps in understanding three of the main aspects that alter the meaning of these spatial terms namely; the effect of size of the surface, the effect of user's position and the effect of the restricted reachability due to objects in the surrounding area. Furthermore this study helps to understand the references used by humans when issuing commands and also builds up a corpus of natural spatial terms frequently used in object manipulation. After statistically analysing the results, the study reveals the extent to which the object placement task is affected by the above mentioned three aspects.