How can I help you? An Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Industrial Robots

In the light of recent trends toward introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), intelligent virtual assistants (VA) driven by Natural Language Processing (NLP) receives ample attention in the manufacturing domain. However, most VAs either tightly bind with a specific robotic system or lack efficient human-robot communication. In this work, we implement a layer of interaction between the robotic system and the human operator. This interaction is achieved using a novel VA, called Max, as an intelligent and robust interface. We expand the research work in three directions. Firstly, we introduce a REST-ful style Client-Server architecture for Max. Secondly, inspired by studies of human-human conversations, we embed conversation strategies into human-robot dialog policy generation to create a more natural and humanized conversation environment. Finally, we evaluate Max over multiple real-world scenarios from the exploration of an unknown environment to package delivery, with the means of an industrial robot.