Context-Awareness in Human-Robot Interaction: Approaches and Challenges

To be seamlessly integrated in human-centered environments, robots are expected to have intelligent social capabilities on top of their physical abilities. To this end, research in artifi-cial intelligence and human-robot interaction face two major challenges. Firstly, robots need to cope with uncertainty during interaction, especially when dealing with factors that are not fully observable and hard to infer (latent variables) such as the states representing the dynamic environment and human behavior (e.g., intents, goals, preferences). Secondly, robots need to communicate their behaviors to agents (humans and other robots in the environment) in a clear and understandable manner. Therefore, robots need to be context-aware: being able to perceive and understand their surroundings, and adapt their functionalities accordingly.