Robot Interaction Language


The Robot Interaction Language is the first spoken language created specifically for talking to robots. ROILA is being developed by the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. The major goals of ROILA are that it should be easily learnable by the user, and optimized for efficient recognition by robots. ROILA has a syntax that allows it to be useful for many different kinds of robots, including the Roomba, and Lego Mindstorms NXT. ROILA is free for anybody to use and to contribute to, as the team has released all documentation and tools under a Creative Commons license.

History

ROILA was developed due to the need for a unified language for humans to speak to robots. The designers performed research into the ability of robots to recognize and interpret natural languages. They discovered that natural languages can be very confusing for robots to interpret sometimes, due to elements such as homophones and tenses. Based on this research, the team set out to create a genetic algorithm that would generate an artificial vocabulary in a way that would be easy for a human to pronounce. The algorithm used the most common phonemes from the most popular natural languages and created easy to pronounce words. The team took the results of this algorithm and formed the ROILA vocabulary.

Language

ROILA has an isolating grammar, meaning that it doesn't have suffixes or prefixes added to words to change their meanings. Instead, these changes are constructed by adding word markers that specify what the changes are, such as the tense of the previous verb. For example, in English the suffix “ed” is added to a word to show that it is in the past tense, but in ROILA the marker word “jifi” is placed after the verb.

Alphabet

Below is the list of all letters and sounds used in ROILA:
LetterIPA transcriptionARPABET transcriptionExample
aæAEbat
eɛEHred
iɪIHbig
oɔAOfrost
uʌAHbut
bbBbuy
ffFfor
jJHjust
kkKkey
llLlate
mmMman
nnNno
ppPpay
ssSsay
ttTtake
wwWway

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of ROILA was generated by an algorithm designed to create a vocabulary with the least confusion amongst words. Each word generated by this algorithm was assigned a basic meaning, as taken from Basic English. The words from Basic English that are used the most frequently are assigned to the shortest ROILA words generated by the algorithm. A short list of words in ROILA is included below, along with their English meaning.
English MeaningROILA Word
airwifawe
andsowu
badtopik
canleto
coldbosipu
endpekot
firenejoj
givebufo
handjiwos
insidepawop
knowbati
leftwebufo
manlosa
numberfelit
outsidebajike
paperbanafu
rightbesati
staytipet
talkseni
useseput
very; pluralizing particletuji
walkfosit
word marker for future tensejifo
word marker for past tensejifi
youbama

Grammar

ROILA was designed to have a regular grammar, with no exceptions to anything. All rules apply to all words in a part of speech. Due to the simple isolating type grammar of ROILA whole word markers are added following parts of speech to show the grammatical category. For example, a word marker placed after a verb type would apply a tense, while a word marker applied after a noun type would apply plurality. ROILA has five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and pronouns. The only pronouns are I, you, he, and she. Sentences follow a subject–verb–object word order.

Examples

The following examples attempt to show what the syntax of the language looks like in various uses.
EnglishROILAGloss
I love this fruitPito loki wikuteI love fruit
I love all fruitsPito loki wikute tujiI love fruit
You are a good personBama wopa tiwilYou good person
I walked to the housePito fosit jifi bubasI walk house
Do not listen to herBuse lulaw monaNo listen her

Availability

ROILA is currently only available for the Lego Mindstorms NXT. It uses the CMU Sphinx speech recognition library to interpret spoken commands to the NXT, and transform them into ROILA commands.