Natural language generation for social robotics: Opportunities and challenges

In the increasingly popular and diverse research area of social robotics, the primary goal is to develop robot agents that exhibit socially intelligent behaviour while interacting in a face-to-face context with human partners. An important aspect of face-to-face social conversation is fluent, flexible linguistic interaction: as Bavelas et al. [1] point out, face-to-face dialogue is both the basic form of human communication and the richest and most flexible, combining unrestricted verbal expression with meaningful non-verbal acts such as gestures and facial displays, along with instantaneous, continuous collaboration between the speaker and the listener. In practice, however, most developers of social robots tend not to use the full possibilities of the unrestricted verbal expression afforded by face-to-face conversation; instead, they generally tend to employ relatively simplistic processes for choosing the words for their robots to say. This contrasts with the work carried out Natural Language Generation (NLG), the field of computational linguistics devoted to the automated production of high-quality linguistic content: while this research area is also an active one, in general most effort in NLG is focussed on producing high-quality written text. This article summarises the state-of-the-art in the two individual research areas of social robotics and natural language generation. It then discusses the reasons why so few current social robots make use of more sophisticated generation techniques. Finally, an approach is proposed to bringing some aspects of NLG into social robotics, concentrating on techniques and tools that are most appropriate to the needs of socially interactive robots

Virgil Robot at Racconigi’s Castle: a Design Challenge.

This paper discusses the role of Design Research (DR) as a mediator between robotics and cultural heritage. This issue has been addressed in the project Virgil, a telepresence robot for visiting inaccessible areas of Racconigi Castle in Piedmont, Italy. A project developed applying an iterative design process that combines the traditional activities of design practice, such as product and service design, to a more theoretical and conceptual activities of DR aimed to generate a meaningful solution. Both the museum context and the state of the art of museum robotic applications have been analysed to define the ethical requirements for the development of the service. The analytical phase is followed by the design stage in which a service concept has been defined, through a process of continuous debate and co-design with various stakeholders. The process has led to the prototyping of a dedicated robot tested in the real environment with random visitors