| Human robot interaction has been an area of great interest for many AI and robotics researchers. Several strategies have been proposed over the years that would enable us to interact and communicate with robots in the same way we interact and communicate with people. One such strategy has been the use of hand drawn sketch maps that can be used to direct mobile robots along a designated path or to a target location, using an interface which is intuitive to humans. Earlier work [Skubic et al., 2006] has shown that a sketch can be used as an effective means of communicating with one or more robots. One of the main constraints in this work has been that it required the user to identify the different objects in the scene and label them correctly on the sketch. If, due to human error, the user did not label the objects correctly then the robots would not be able plan their paths effectively and as a result would be unable to navigate correctly through the scene. The work proposed in this thesis relaxes this constraint and, as a result, makes the sketch interface more robust. |
