Which One? Grounding the Referent Based on Efficient Human-Robot Interaction

In human-robot interaction, a robot must be prepared to handle possible ambiguities generated by a human partner. In this work we propose a set of strategies that allow a robot to identify the referent when the human partner refers to an object giving incomplete information, i.e. an ambiguous description. Moreover, we propose the use of an ontology to store and reason on the robot's knowledge to ease clarification, and therefore, improve interaction. We validate our work through both simulation and two real robotic platforms performing two tasks: a daily-life situation and a game.