This paper presents ongoing research on assistive service robotics for health-care and home applications. The whole control system is based on a behavior-based architecture that integrates reactive behavior into a task driven structure. Efficient and natural robot communications are promoted by employing the user's perceived object color names. This information is then integrated with simple object shape features for object location and recognition. An error recovery strategy is embedded in each behavior by incorporating reasoning and an error recovery template into the behavior structure. Error recovery experience is also stored in the template and used to adjust the error recovery action generation process to improve the system's performance during its lifetime.