Many times, natural language commands issued to robots not only specify a particular target configuration or goal state but also outline constraints on how the robot goes about its execution. That is, the path taken to achieving some goal state is given equal importance to the goal state itself. One example of this could be instructing a wheeled robot to “go to the living room but avoid the kitchen,” in order to avoid scuffing the floor. This class of behaviors poses a serious obstacle to existing language understanding for robotics approaches that map to either action sequences or goal state representations. Due to the non-Markovian nature of the objective, approaches in the former category must map to potentially unbounded action sequences whereas approaches in the latter category would require folding the entirety of a robot’s trajectory into a (traditionally Markovian) state representation, resulting in an intractable decision-making problem. To resolve this challenge, we use a recently introduced probabilistic variant of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) as a goal specification language for a Markov Decision Process (MDP). While demonstrating that standard neural sequence-to-sequence learning models can successfully ground language to this semantic representation, we also provide analysis that highlights generalization to novel, unseen logical forms as an open problem for this class of model. We evaluate our system within two simulated robot domains as well as on a physical robot, demonstrating accurate language grounding alongside a significant expansion in the space of interpretable robot behaviors.
Our paper was recently published at RSS 2018 and you can read it here!
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