Robust Speech Understanding for Robot Telecontrol

This paper describes an Automatic Speech Understanding (ASU) system used in a human-robot interface for the remote control of a mobile robot. The intended application is that of an operator issuing telecontrol commands to one or more robots from a remote workstation. ASU is supposed to be performed with continuous speech, speaker independence, and quasi real time conditions. Training and testing of the system was based on speech data collected by means of Wizard of Oz simulations. Two kinds of robustness factors are introduced: the first is a recognition-errortolerant approach to semantic interpretation, the second is based on a technique for evaluating the reliability of the ASU system output with respect to the input utterance. Preliminary results are 93% correct semantic interpretations, and 96.5% correct detection of out-of-domain sentences at the cost of rejecting 6.7% correct in-domain sentences. I. Introduction This paper describes an Automatic Speech Understanding (ASU) syste..