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Robotics: Teaching Robots how to Interact with the “Theory of Intent”
“Theory of Intent” or “Theory of Mind” is an explanation for how humans communicate their intent through their actions and signals. Humans are instinctively able to anticipate how other humans will respond under certain conditions. This allows humans to quickly observe and then predict how someone else will react. We don’t understand exactly how humans are able to do this. Some of it may have to do with empathy and our memory of what happened in the past under certain conditions.
Robotic scientists are trying to be able to develop a “theory of mind” for robots that will make them more collaborative and smarter in how they respond to their environment, especially when they are surrounded by humans and other robots. In contrast, the current generation of robots use very detailed low-level cpu-intensive processing to make decisions, which tends not to be that efficient.
Dorsa Sadigh, an assistant professor at Stanford, said that “if you think about human-human interactions, for example, if we’re trying to move a table together, two people rely on simple signals like the forces they feel from their collaborator pushing or pulling the table.”
A group of scientists in the UK and Germany, led by Alan Winfield, are experimenting with the idea of robots internally running a simulation of nearby moving objects in their environment and predicting the motion of those objects. Based on the predictions from the simulation, a robot can then safely navigate to a destination point while avoiding any of the nearby moving objects.
Panos Tsiotras, professor at Georgia Tech, said that “determining intent is important not just for detecting behavior and planning, but also for higher-level thinking. Sometimes detecting driver intent is easy, if people indicate it with turn signals. Sometimes they don’t, and at an intersection with a flashing light, people may make eye contact, nod, or wave hands to indicate who should merge. Autonomous vehicles should also be able to see that and figure it out.”
