Context-Based Bayesian Intent Recognition

One of the foundations of social interaction among humans is the ability to correctly identify interactions and infer the intentions of others. To build robots that reliably function in the human social world, we must develop models that robots can use to mimic the intent recognition skills found in humans. We propose a framework that uses contextual information in the form of object affordances and object state to improve the performance of an underlying intent recognition system. This system represents objects and their affordances using a directed graph that is automatically extracted from a large corpus of natural language text. We validate our approach on a physical robot that classifies intentions in a number of scenarios.