Communicating Robots with LEGO MindStorms

Beyond and Besides the Course

Robotics, as a subject in Artificial Intelligence, is a fascinating area -- not just in and by itself, but also in its relation to computational linguistics. Most computational linguistics considers language "on the screen", completely disembodied from a concrete, physical environment. This means that a variety of phenomena that are dependent on such an environment, like the meaningful interpretation of deixis, can hardly be studied. Similarly, the language faculty as part of intelligent behavior can only be studied in isolation that way. Relating robotics and computational linguistics changes all that: Language use now becomes "embodied".