Engineering Context from the Ground Up

We are engineering a system that is designed for a human and a robot to solve problems in a shared space. This system uses context to manage interactions with a human collaborator as well as to manage more mundane aspects of context, such a combining speech and gesture input. Our system is highly modular so as to facilitate good engineering practice. It uses a blackboard type architecture to represent and maintain information of different aspects in the problem-solving process and to maintain context. We give an overview of the current status of our system. We explain the components of our system and provide details of the information produced by the various system components. Additionally, we explain how information is accumulated on the blackboard and discuss and evaluate how various aspects of context are addressed in our system.