---
title: "A Computational Model for the Alignment of Hierarchical Scene Representations in Human-Robot Interaction"
authors:
  - "Agnes Swadzba"
  - "Sven Wachsmuth"
  - "Constanze Vorwerg"
  - "Gert Rickheit"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/308"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/0308.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2009
pages: "1857-1862"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# A Computational Model for the Alignment of Hierarchical Scene Representations in Human-Robot Interaction

Agnes Swadzba, Sven Wachsmuth, Constanze Vorwerg, Gert Rickheit

*Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1857-1862.

## Abstract

The ultimate goal of human-robot interaction is to enable the robot to seamlessly communicate with a human in a natural human-like fashion. Most work in this field concentrates on the speech interpretation and gesture recognition side assuming that a propositional scene representation is available. Less work was dedicated to the extraction of relevant scene structures that underlies these propositions. As a consequence, most approaches are restricted to place recognition or simple table top settings and do not generalize to more complex room setups. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical spatial model that is empirically motivated from psycholinguistic studies. Using this model the robot is able to extract scene structures from a time-of-flight depth sensor and adjust its spatial scene representation by taking verbal statements about partial scene aspects into account. Without assuming any pre-known model of the specific room, we show that the system aligns its sensor-based room representation to a semantically meaningful representation typically used by the human descriptor.Agnes Swadzba, Constanze Vorwerg, Sven Wachsmuth, Gert Rickheit