Co-development of task models through robot-human interaction

Recently there is an increasing demand for service robots which help humans in home and office environments. Such a robot has to deal with a much wider range of tasks and environments than usual industrial ones, and it is very difficult for a manufacturer to give the robot all pieces of necessary knowledge in advance. This paper, therefore, proposes an interactive teaching method using task models. A task model describes what pieces of knowledge are necessary to achieve a task. The robot examines the task model, determines missing pieces of knowledge, and actively asks the instructor to teach them. This makes the teaching easier because the instructor does not have to think what and when to teach by himself. A task model, completed through interaction, is used for the robot to realize the corresponding task. We have developed a prototype of the task model-based teaching system and successfully applied it to teaching a service robot several tasks.