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<Paper uid="C04-1049">
  <Title>Talking Robots With LEGO MindStorms</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Discussion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The first lesson we can learn from the work described above is that affordable COTS products in dialogue and robotics have advanced to the point that it is feasible to build simple but interesting talking robots with limited effort. The Lego MindStorms platform, combined with the Lejos system, turned out to be a flexible and affordable robotics framework. More &amp;quot;professional&amp;quot; robots have the distinct advantage of more interesting sensors and more powerful on-board computing equipment, and are generally more physically robust, but Lego MindStorms is more than suitable for robotics experimentation under controlled circumstances.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Each of the robots was designed, built, and programmed within twenty person-weeks, after an initial work phase in which we created the basic infrastructure shown in Figure 1. One prerequisite of this rather efficient development process was that the entire software was built on the Java platform, and was kept highly modular. Speech software adhering to the Java Speech API is becoming available, and plugging e.g. a different JSAPI-compliant speech recogniser into our system is now a matter of changing a line in a configuration file.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> However, building talking robots is still a challenge that combines the particular problems of dialogue systems and robotics, both of which introduce situations of incomplete information. The dialogue side has to robustly cope with speech recognition errors, and our setup inherits all limitations inherent in finite-state dialogue; applications having to do e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> with information seeking dialogue would be better served with a more complex dialogue model. On the other hand, a robot lives in the real world, and has to deal with imprecisions in measuring its position, unexpected obstacles, communications with the PC breaking off, and extremely limited sensory information about its surroundings.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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