Towards Task Understanding through Multi-State Visuo-Spatial Perspective Taking for Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

For a lifelong learning robot, in the context of task understanding, it is important to distinguish the 'meaning' of a task from the 'means' to achieve it. In this paper we will select a set of tasks in a typical Human-Robot interaction scenario such as show, hide, make accessible, etc., and illustrate that visuo-spatial perspective taking can be effectively used to understand such tasks' semantics in terms of 'effect'. The idea is, for understanding the 'ef-fects' the robot analyzes the reachability and visibility of an agent not only from the current state of the agent but also from a set of virtual states, which the agent might attain with different level of efforts from his/its current state. We show that such symbolic understandings of tasks could be generalized to new situations or spatial arrangements, as well as facilitate 'transfer of understanding' among heterogeneous robots. Robot begins to understand the semantics of the task from the first demonstration and continuously refines its understanding with further examples.