Intention and Body-Mood Engineering via Proactive Robot Moves in HRI

1. Introduction

Recent developments on both artificial intelligence and hardware capabilities for the robots resulted in greater advances in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Nowadays, robots are integral parts of both industry and our homes, assisting or replacing humans but working with them(Erden & Tomiyama, 2010). Assistant robots should thus understand and model intents and tendencies in these interactions if they want to satisfy needs of their interacting human agents (Yokoyama & Omori, 2010). Such robots have the capability to recognize intentions and emotions of other agents and can interact exhibiting social behaviors and are consequently called socially intelligent robots (Kerstin Dautenhahn & Billard, 1999).

During social interactions between intelligent agents, estimating the intentions and emotions of one another, termed social cognition (Fong et al., 2003), is required to infer the social behavior of the opponent which eventually results in inducing one’s own intentions onto the other by compromises or persuasion (Heinze, 2003; K. A. Tahboub, 2006). Morphing actions on intentions also called reshaping (Durdu et al., 2011) are strategic moves of an agent with the purpose of attaining a desired change on the other interacting agent based on the statement that one’s intentions direct one’s future planning (Bratman, 1999). In our previous study Durdu et al.(2011), introduced a new approach on intention reshaping performing social moves for changing current human intentions. We extend this work by controlling this change according to obeying a desired intention trajectory. Full-autonomous robots then model social cognitions from the on-line observations of human headings and trajectories, planning their own trajectories in ways familiar to the human using elastic networks. According to the detected human-body mood and the estimated current intention of the person, generation of trajectories aims first to break the obstinance of the person increasing his/her confidence with the robot and the environment, then enabling reshaping actions. This approach emulates a social interaction between humans, increasing the chance of the robots to understand human behaviors and react proactively.

The main motivation behind developing such sociable robot having enhanced social cognition abilities is to realize real life cooperation scenarios with human, such as guiding people in emergency situations where verbal communication is impossible by classifying them as being confident or suspicious and treating them accordingly. In addition, these robots can be used commercially catching the attention of the people and leading them towards their shops generating purchase intentions. Moreover, they can be versatile companions for the needy in smart homes by understanding intentions and offering service even when intentions are quickly forgotten by patients.