A framework for endowing an interactive robot with reasoning capabilities about perspective-taking and belief management

Abstract

In daily human interactions, spatial reasoning occupies an important place. In this paper we present a situation assessment reasoner that generates relevant symbolic information from the geometry of the environment with respect to relations between objects and human capabilities. The role of SPARK (SPAtial Reasoning and Knowledge) component is to permanently maintain a state of the world in order to provide a basis for the robot to plan, to act, to react and to interact. More precisely, we describe here the way the system manages the hypotheses to be able to handle such knowledge in a flexible manner. Equipped with such capabilities, a robot that will interact with humans should be able to extract, compute or infer these relations and capabilities in order to communicate and interact efficiently in a natural way. To illustrate our work, we will explain how the robot is able to manage and update agents beliefs and pass Sally-Anne test. This work is part of a broader effort to develop a complete decisional framework for human-robot interactive task achievement.