Chandimal Jayawardena

Controlling a robot manipulator with fuzzy voice commands using a probabilistic neural network

Natural language commands are generated by intelligent human beings. As a result, they contain a lot of information. Therefore, if it is possible to learn from such commands and reuse that knowledge, it will be a very efficient process. In this paper, learning from such information rich voice commands for controlling a robot is studied. First, new concepts of fuzzy coach-player system and sub-coach are proposed for controlling robots with natural language commands. Then, the characteristics of the subjective human decision making process are discussed and a Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) based learning method is proposed to learn from such commands and to reuse the acquired knowledge. Finally, the proposed concept is demonstrated and confirmed with experiments conducted using a PA-10 redundant manipulator.

Posture control of robot manipulators with fuzzy voice commands using a fuzzy coach–player system

This paper presents a method of controlling robot manipulators with fuzzy voice commands. Recently, there has been some research on controlling robots using information-rich fuzzy voice commands such as go little slowly and learning from such commands. However, the scope of all those works was limited to basic fuzzy voice motion commands. In this paper, we introduce a method of controlling the posture of a manipulator using complex fuzzy voice commands. A complex fuzzy voice command is composed of a set of fuzzy voice joint commands. Complex fuzzy voice commands can be used for complicated maneuvering of a manipulator, while fuzzy voice joint commands affect only a single joint. Once joint commands are learned, any complex command can be learned as a combination of some or all of them, so that, using the learned complex commands, a human user can control the manipulator in a complicated manner with natural language commands. Learning of complex commands is discussed in the framework of fuzzy coach–player model. The proposed idea is demonstrated with a PA-10 redundant manipulator.

Intelligent Interface Using Natural Voice and Vision for Supporting the Acquisition of Robot Behaviors

Natural language usage for robot control is essential for developing successful human-friendly robotic systems. In spite of the fact that the realization of robots with high cognitive capabilities that understand natural instructions as humans is quite difficult, there is a high potential for introducing voice interfaces for most of the existing robotic systems. Although there have been some interesting work in this domain, usually the scope and the efficiency of natural language controlled robots are limited due to constraints in the number of built in commands, the amount of information contained in a command, the reuse of excessive commands, etc. We present a multimodal interface for a robotic manipulator, which can learn both from human user voice instructions and vision input to overcome some of these drawbacks. Results of three experiments, i.e., learning situations, learning actions, and learning objects are presented.

Approximate Decision Making by Natural Language Commands for Robots

Inferring the correct meaning of natural language commands, as judged by the person who issues commands, is mandatory for natural language commanded robotic systems. There have been some successful research on this; but one of the important and related aspects has not been addressed, i.e. the possibility of learning from natural language commands. Since natural language commands are generated by human users, they contain valuable information. Nevertheless, the learning from such commands, as well as the interpretation of them face many challenges due to the inherent subjectiveness of natural languages. In this paper, we propose a decision making process for natural language commanded robots which is influenced by certain characteristics of human decision making process. The proposed concept is demonstrated with an experiment conducted using a robotic manipulator. First, the robot is controlled with natural language commands to perform some pick and place operations during which the robot builds a knowledge base. After learning, the robot is capable of performing approximately similar tasks by making approximate decisions with the gained knowledge. For the decision making a probabilistic neural network is used

Teaching a tele-robot using natural language commands

For Internet-based teleoperation systems, user-friendly natural interfaces are advantageous because those systems are intended to be used by non-experts. In developing user friendly interfaces, natural language communication is mandatory. This paper presents a system in which a sub-set of natural language is used to command a tele-robot manipulator doing an object sorting task. The paper discusses about referring to objects with natural language commands such as pick the small red cube. This is achieved by learning individual lexical symbols that refer to colors, shapes, and sizes independently, and then inferring the meaning of a combination of them.