Generating Legible Motion

Abstract

Legible motion -motion that communicates its intent to a human observer -is crucial for enabling seamless human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we propose a functional gradient optimization technique for autonomously generating legible motion. Our algorithm optimizes a legibility metric inspired by the psychology of action interpretation in humans, resulting in motion trajectories that purposefully deviate from what an observer would expect in order to better convey intent. A trust region constraint on the optimization ensures that the motion does not become too surprising or unpredictable to the observer.