Exploring Spoken Dialog Interaction in Human-Robot Teams

We describe TeamTalk: A human-robot interface  capable of interpreting spoken dialog interactions between humans and robots in  consistent real-world and virtual world scenarios. The system is used in real environments by humanrobot teams to perform tasks associated with treasure hunting. In order to conduct research exploring spoken human-robot interaction, we have developed a virtual platform using USARSim. We describe  the system, its use as a high-fidelity simulator with USARSim, and current experiments that benefit from a simulated environment and that would be difficult to implement in real-world scenarios.