With my wonderful collaborators Cynthia Matuszek, Hadas Kress-Gazit and Nakul Gopalan, we published a review paper about language and robots. This article surveys the use of natural language in robotics from a robotics point of view. To use human language, robots must map words to aspects of the physical world, mediated by the robot’s sensors and actuators. This problem differs from other natural language processing domains due to the need to ground the language to noisy percepts and physical actions. We describe central aspects of language use by robots, including understanding natural language requests, using language to drive learning about the physical world, and engaging in collaborative dialogue with a human partner. We describe common approaches, roughly divided into learning methods, logic-based methods, and methods that focus on questions of human–robot inter-action. Finally, we describe several application domains for language-using robots.

It was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the past 10 years since my Ph.D. thesis in 2010 and survey the amazing progress we have seen in robots and language.