Software Engineering Institute

Autonomous mobile robots navigate in our spaces by planning and executing routes to destinations. When a mobile robot appears at a location, there is no clear way to understand what navigational path the robot planned and experienced just by looking at it. In this work, we address the generation of narrations of autonomous mobile robot navigation experiences. We contribute the concept of verbalization as a parallel to the well-studied concept of visualization. Through verbalizations, robots can describe through language what they experience, in particular in their paths. For every executed path, we consider many possible verbalizations that could be generated. We introduce the verbalization space that covers the variability of utterances that the robot may use to narrate its experience to different humans. We present an algorithm for segmenting a path and mapping each segment to an utterance, as a function of the desired point in the verbalization space, and demonstrate its application using our mobile service robot moving in our buildings. We believe our verbalization space and algorithm are applicable to different narrative aspects for many mobile robots, including autonomous cars.