A Natural Interface and Unified Skills for a Mobile Robot

interact naturally without having to explicitly state or re-state each expected or desired action when an interruption occurs. We hope to extend goal tracking so that the mobile robot can complete semantically related goals which are not initially specified or which are unknown to the human at the time when the initial goal is instantiated. This natural interface is currently in use with a mo- This work was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. bile robot. Navigation goals and locations are specified by speech and/or with natural gestures. Commands can be interrupted and subsequently completed with fragmentary utterances. To provide the basic underlying skills for navigating in previously unknown environments, we are working to create a mobile robot system that is robust and adaptive in rapidly changing environments. We view integration of these skills as a basic research issue, studying the combination of different, complementary capabilities. One principle tha