Social robots: beyond tools to partners

This work presents our efforts towards building sociable autonomous robots that can work in collaboration with people. In teamwork, it is critical that a robot partner be able to infer and understand the human's goals and intentions in order to anticipate the person's needs and offer appropriate assistance in a timely manner. We present our framework for human-robot collaboration based on joint intention theory, and our initial efforts to develop a simulation-theoretic approach for anticipating the human partner's goals to proactively offer help. These abilities would enable many new and exciting applications for robots that require them to play a long-term, supportive, and helpful role in people's daily lives.