Skip to main content

Controlling Industrial Robots with High-Level Verbal Commands

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Social Robotics (ICSR 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13086))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Industrial robots today are still mostly pre-programmed to perform a specific task. Despite previous research in human-robot interaction in the academia, adopting such systems in industrial settings is not trivial and has rarely been done. In this paper, we introduce a robotic system that we control with high-level verbal commands, leveraging some of the latest neural approaches to language understanding and a cognitive architecture for goal-directed but reactive execution. We show that a large-scale pre-trained language model can be effectively fine-tuned for translating verbal instructions into robot tasks, better than other semantic parsing methods, and that our system is capable of handling through dialogue a variety of exceptions that happen during human-robot interaction including unknown tasks, user interruption, and changes in the world state.

This research is supported by A*STAR under its Human-Robot Collaborative AI for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering (Award A18A2b0046).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/donglixp/coarse2fine.

References

  1. Artzi, Y., Das, D., Petrov, S.: Learning compact lexicons for CCG semantic parsing. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1273–1283 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Cambria, E., Poria, S., Hazarika, D., Kwok, K.: SenticNet 5: discovering conceptual primitives for sentiment analysis by means of context embeddings. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1795–1802 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Chen, H., Tan, H., Kuntz, A., Bansal, M., Alterovitz, R.: Enabling robots to understand incomplete natural language instructions using commonsense reasoning. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 1963–1969 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Choi, D., Langley, P.: Evolution of the ICARUS cognitive architecture. Cogn. Syst. Res. 48, 25–38 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 4171–418 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Dong, L., Lapata, M.: Coarse-to-fine decoding for neural semantic parsing. In: Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 731–742 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Elgohary, A., Hosseini, S., Awadallah, A.H.: Speak to your parser: interactive text-to-SQL with natural language feedback. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 2065–2077 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Fikes, R., Nilsson, N.: STRIPS: a new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Artif. Intell. 2, 189–208 (1971)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Hochreiter, S., Schmidhuber, J.: Long short-term memory. Neural Comput. 9(8), 1735–1780 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Horn, A.: On sentences which are true of direct unions of algebras. J. Symbolic Log. 16, 14–21 (1951)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  11. Jia, Y., She, L., Cheng, Y., Bao, J., Chai, J.Y., Xi, N.: Program robots manufacturing tasks by natural language instructions. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, pp. 633–638 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kuo, Y.L., Katz, B., Barbu, A.: Deep compositional robotic planners that follow natural language commands. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 4906–4912 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Laird, J.E., et al.: Interactive task learning. IEEE Intell. Syst. 32(4), 6–21 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Park, J.S., Jia, B., Bansal, M., Manocha, D.: Efficient generation of motion plans from attribute-based natural language instructions using dynamic constraint mapping. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 6964–6971 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Pennington, J., Socher, R., Manning, C.D.: GloVe: Global vectors for word representation. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1532–1543 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Radford, A., et al.: Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI blog 1, 9 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Raffel, C., et al.: Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to-text transformer. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 21(140), 1–67 (2020)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  18. Venkatesh, S.G., et al.: Spatial reasoning from natural language instructions for robot manipulation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Wächter, M., et al.: Integrating multi-purpose natural language understanding, robot’s memory, and symbolic planning for task execution in humanoid robots. Robot. Auton. Syst. 99, 148–165 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Yin, P., Neubig, G., Yih, W.T., Riedel, S.: TaBERT: pretraining for joint understanding of textual and tabular data. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 8413–8426 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Zeng, J., et al.: Photon: a robust cross-domain text-to-SQL system. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pp. 204–214 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dongkyu Choi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Choi, D., Shi, W., Liang, Y.S., Yeo, K.H., Kim, JJ. (2021). Controlling Industrial Robots with High-Level Verbal Commands. In: Li, H., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13086. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_19

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_19

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-90524-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-90525-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics