Recognizing human intentional actions from the relative movements between human and robot

Human intention recognition is one of the most important research areas in the human-robot interaction in order to accomplish more natural and intelligent interaction. In the public service area, the basic four human intentional actions, `approach', `depart', `bypass', and `stop' were investigated by the human's movement pattern. In order to recognize those four human intentional actions, the mobile robot measured 360 degree distance between a robot and a human by two IR-scanner sensors, and three problems were solved: 1) human detection and tracking by improved K-means clustering method, 2) absolute human velocity estimation by extended Kalman filter, and 3) inferring intentional actions by HMM with position-dependent observation model. The result showed as quite good performance that inferred the probabilities of those four intentional actions.