candidates such as “ball,” “fall,” and “gall.” Now, if the
previous three words are “Johnny hit the,” the algorithm
will likely rank ball as the most probable word. Current
accuracy limitations are about 97%, even with individual
training, and accuracy isn’t improved by adding
processing power or memory.
The obvious limitation to current speech recognition
software is that it’s simply a replacement for the
keyboard and video display. There is no underlying
intelligence or reasoning capability. Of course, prototype
systems capable of reasoning have been developed in
academia, but these demonstration projects have been
limited to highly constrained domains.
What we need in robotics is a system that not only
recognizes the phrase, “Johnny hit the ball,” but that can
infer with what. If Johnny is playing soccer, we might
infer he hit the ball with his head. If the sport is baseball,
then we might infer he used a bat. Back to our needs in
robotics, the owner of a service bot should be able to
say, “Please bring me the paper” and the robot should be
able to infer that the owner is referring to the newspaper.
There are also issues of image recognition, mobility, and
grasping the paper, but they all depend on the robot
understanding the need of the owner.
The limitation of speech recognition in robotics then
isn’t in the ability to transform utterances into machine
readable form, but with how the computational elements
of the robot should process the machine readable words
and phrases into actionable commands. So, how do you
go about accomplishing this?
It’s a non-trivial task, as a search of the IEEE literature
on Natural Language Processing will illustrate. The
traditional techniques — such as Hidden Markov Modeling
— might be a bit intimidating if you don’t have a degree
in computer science. However, you can get a feel for the
tools used to map out the contextual meanings of words
and phrases by working with Personal Brain. You can
download the free, fully-functional personal version at
www.thebrain.com.
You can use the Brain to build context maps that
show, for example, inheritance and the relationship
between various objects in your home (see Figure 1). For
your robot to bring you the newspaper, it would have to
first locate the paper, and it would help to know the
possible locations the paper might be found in the home.
It would be inefficient, for example, if the robot began
digging through your clothes’ closet in search of the
newspaper, instead of on the table in your kitchen.
Once you get used to working with Personal Brain,
you might want to explore other uses in robotics. For
example, I keep track of my various robotic projects –
parts, suppliers, references, etc.— by creating networks
with the program. In fact, the best way to build context
maps is to create explicit, detailed maps that actually help
you in everyday tasks. SV
SERVO 11.2008 7
