A Review of Methodologies for Natural-Language-Facilitated Human-Robot Cooperation

Natural-language-facilitated human-robot cooperation (NLC) refers to using natural language (NL) to facilitate interactive information sharing and task executions with a common goal constraint between robots and humans. Recently, NLC research has received increasing attention. Typical NLC scenarios include robotic daily assistance, robotic health caregiving, intelligent manufacturing, autonomous navigation, and robot social accompany. However, a thorough review, that can reveal latest methodologies to use NL to facilitate human-robot cooperation, is missing. In this review, a comprehensive summary about methodologies for NLC is presented. NLC research includes three main research focuses: NL instruction understanding, NL-based execution plan generation, and knowledge-world mapping. In-depth analyses on theoretical methods, applications, and model advantages and disadvantages are made. Based on our paper review and perspective, potential research directions of NLC are summarized.