1 Telling Rolland where to go: HRI dialogues on route navigation Hui Shi and Thora Tenbrink 1 SFB/TR8 Spatial Cognition, University of Bremen, Germany Abstract Our aim is to enable uninformed users to instruct the Bremen autonomous wheelchair Rolland to move towards specific goals via route directions. Empirical data are used to augment the robot's internal representation as well as to identify a number of conceptual problem areas involved in the spatial communication between a human and a robot. The problematic aspects are tackled via the design of a dialogue system capable of managing the available information and asking appropriate clarification questions in order to ensure efficient communication. 1. Introduction Within the SFB/TR 8 on Spatial Cognition, one prominent research aim is to achieve effective and natural communication between humans and robots about spatial issues. While some of the work so far has addressed spatial instruction scenarios in which a robot was instructed to move towards one of several similar objects present in a scenario (e.g., Moratz & Tenbrink, in press; Tenbrink & Moratz 2003), the present aim is to enable previously uninformed users to "tell Rolland where to go" via a suitable dialogue model. 'Rolland' is the name of the Bremen autonomous wheelchair (e.g., Lankenau & Röfer 2000), a mobile robot equipped with sensorial and conceptual functionalities, which we use to investigate how humans communicate linguistically about route navigation. Comparable work of other research groups also dealing with the automatic treatment of route instructions given to robots is presented, for example, in Bugmann et al. (2004), Ligozat (2000), and Tschander 1 A number of further people within the projects of the SFB/TR 8 on Spatial Cognition are involved in this work, for instance, John Bateman, Scott Farrar, Kerstin Fischer, Udo Frese, Bernd Krieg-Brückner, Christian Mandel, Reinhard Moratz, Thomas Röfer, Robert Ross, Tilman Vierhuff, and others. Their participation in the development of the ideas and results presented here is acknowledged.