ROILA: Robot Interaction Language

This thesis presents such a new balance by proposing a new artificial language named RObot Interaction LAnguage (ROILA), created using the methodology of research through design (Zimmerman, Forlizzi, & Evenson, 2007). The two conflicting requirements for ROILA is to, on the one hand, be easy for humans to learn and speak, and on the other hand, be easy for the machines to recognize. An example for this conflict is the word length. Speech recognizers are more accurate for long words (Hamalainen, Boves, & De Veth, 2005), which are difficult to learn and speak. Humans prefer short words, since they are more efficient and easier to remember. In addition, in this project we do not extensively deal with Speech Synthesis. Providing text to speech with natural prosody is a complete research area in itself. Later on in the thesis we will reveal our efforts with Speech Synthesis in the project but this was only as a means of providing a wholeness to our prototype. To reiterate, our focus is on improving speech recognition accuracy by not providing new algorithms but by giving the machine or robot input which is easy to recognize. Another aspect that we did not wish to focus on extensively was the effect of contextual information on the accuracy of speech recognition. Therefore we aimed to design an artificial language that would not be dependent on semantics and consequently we could adopt any context of use for ROILA. The format of the thesis follows a standard HCI design approach, i.e., initial investigation, design, implementation and evaluation. The second chapter of the thesis overviews existing artificial languages and attempts to extract linguistic commonalities amongst them and also in comparison to natural languages. The third chapter details the design of ROILA and explains the various iterations involved within the design stage. The fourth chapter explains the implementation of the ROILA into prototypes and gives an introductory example. The fifth chapter ascertains subjective impressions of users while interacting in constrained or artificial languages. The sixth chapter describes the ROILA evaluation carried out at a local school in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, where high school children learnt ROILA in a specially designed curriculum and used it to interact with robots. The main contributions of the thesis and the future prospects are rounded off in the last chapter.