Multiple-Agent Dialogue Thomas K Harris, Satanjeev (Bano) Banerjee Alex Rudnicky Boeing Kick-off Meeting June 8, 2004

Multiple Agent Dialogue2 What do we have today? A platform that supports multiple (robot) participants –Sphinx II ASR; Festival TTS –RavenClaw dialogue manager –Galaxy-II message-passing architecture –Carmen “back-end” interface A basic corridor movement domain –Commands to move robots along in vectors and towards named locations –Mechanisms for describing robot status and location to human

Multiple Agent Dialogue3 System architecture

Multiple Agent Dialogue4 Does it work? Tested on 6 users in a maze navigation scenario –Around half of the tasks were successful –Timing issues with moving robots trying to describe their locations –Robot feedback to commands was insufficient –People actually preferred dealing with multiple robots System and experiments described in a paperpaper It’s a little buggy yet 

Multiple Agent Dialogue5 TeamTalk: The movie

Multiple Agent Dialogue6 Tasks Direction understanding Dialogue structure Location and task description generation More bots (we’ve never had more than 2) Interaction speed