This robot can ask for clarification

​New York: Researchers have developed an algorithm that lets robots ask for clarification when they are not sure what exactly a person wants them to fetch, especially when there are lots of very similar objects in close proximity to each other.

"Fetching objects is an important task that we want collaborative robots to be able to do," said lead researcher Stefanie Tellex, Professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, US.

"But it is easy for the robot to make errors, either by misunderstanding what we want, or by being in situations where commands are ambiguous.

So what we wanted to do here was come up with a way for the robot to ask a question when it's not sure," Tellex said.

Tellex's lab had previously developed an algorithm that enables robots to receive speech commands as well as information from human gestures.

It is a form of interaction that people use all the time. When we ask someone for an object, we'll often point to it at the same time.