Human‐robot interface with attention

This paper describes the utterance generation system Linta‐II, which was developed aiming at the realization of the flexible human‐robot interface. Linta‐II is implemented on an autonomous mobile robot. Based on the information from the sensor installed on the robot, the utterance can be generated according to the situation. In Linta‐II, the sensor information is acquired effectively using the attention mechanism. The attention mechanism is constructed as a set of entities executing simple symbol processings. It realizes two kinds of attentions, i.e., the involuntary and voluntary attentions. The involuntary attention has the function of paying immediate attention to the external event. The voluntary attention is activated by other modules such as the action control unit, and executes the top‐down processing. Linta‐II utilizes those two kinds of attention mechanisms, and can generate the utterance according to the situation, even if the rule to determine the sensor information to be referred to cannot completely be described. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the attention mechanism by presenting several examples of utterances by Linta‐II.