The Army’s Next Robot Will Know When You’re Talking Trash to It – And Know When to Talk Back

Published: August 5, 2020
Category: News

The Army is developing a system to allow autonomous ground robots to communicate with soldiers through natural conversations — and, in time, learn to respond to soldier instructions no matter how informal or potentially crass they may be.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, working in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, have developed a new capability that allows conversational dialogue between soldiers and autonomous systems.

The capability, known as the Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface (JUDI), is elegant in its simplicity: the system processes spoken language instructions from soldiers, derives the core intent, and carries out a set of functions, according to Dr. Matthew Marge, a computer scientist at ARL.

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