A new report that built on a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and University of Maryland provides 31 recommendations on enabling spoken language interaction between soldiers and robots to help the U.S. Army pursue modernization in the areas of artificial intelligence and autonomy.
An AI expert panel led by an Army Research Laboratory (ARL) scientist studied how to form a connection between speech or dialogue and robotics disciplines to come up with specific research suggestions and create a long-term technology roadmap, the military service branch said Thursday.
Prioritizing human needs, enhancing research infrastructure and resources, enabling operation of all speech and language components in real time, improving combination of communication modalities and implementing new approaches to technology adaption are some of the general themes of the report recommendations.
"The technology roadmap and research recommendations within this seminal report are to direct the Department of Defense and other funding agencies on foundational research needed to create speech-capable robots that can naturally talk with humans,” said Matthew Marge, senior research scientist at ARL.
He added that the study's highlighted topics could help the Army determine which areas to focus its investments with regard to speech and robotics. The Next Generation Combat Vehicle is one of the Army programs expected to benefit from the report guidelines.