A study of interaction between dialog and decision for human-robot collaborative task achievement

Human-robot collaboration requires both communicative and decision making skills of a robot. To enable flexible coordination and turn-taking between human users and a robot in joint tasks, the robot's dialog and decision making mechanism have to be synchronized in a meaningful way. In this paper, we propose a integration framework to combine the dialog and the decision making processes. With this framework, we investigate various task negotiation situations for a social robot in a fetch-and-carry scenario. For the technical realization of the framework, the interface specification between the dialog and the decision making systems is also presented. Further, we discuss several challenging issues identified in our integration effort that should be adddressed in the future.