Spatial Strategies in Human-Robot Communication

This paper deals with various kinds of mental representations available for linguistic instruction in spatial humanrobot interaction. After a survey of the literature on spatial representations in humans, focussing on dialogical interaction, we present a linguistic-pragmatic method for the analysis of spatial human-robot interaction. This method allows us to gain insights concerning the discourse strategies speakers employ, reflecting the underlying spatial representations in the reference systems employed. Furthermore, the users' hypotheses about the robot's functionalities are reflected in the succession of commands they try out in cases of failure. We describe an experiment involving human users and a robot that was designed on the basis of previous research on human spatial representations, and present new insights regarding both conceptual and spatial representational variation