Multi sensors-based approach for intention reading with soft computing techniques

Human's intention plays a key role in human-machine interaction as in the case of a robot serving for a handicapped person. The quality of a service robot will be much enhanced if the robot can infer the human's intension during the interaction process. In this paper, we propose a soft computing-based technique to read a user's intention using some multisensors-based approach. We have tested the technique by a scenario of 'serving a drink to the user'. With such force/torque or vision sensor, the robot can effectively infer the user's intention to drink the beverage or not to drink. As an application, this intention technique is employed for building a rehabilitation robot, called KARES II, to perform various human-friendly human-robot interaction.