Fuzzy modeling and control for intention recognition in human-robot systems

The recognition of human intentions from trajectories in the framework of human-robot interaction is a challenging field of research. In this paper some control problems of the human-robot interaction and their intentions to compete or cooperate in shared work spaces are addressed and the time schedule of the information flow is discussed. The expected human movements relative to the robot are summarized in a so-called "compass dial" from which fuzzy control rules for the robot's reactions are derived. To avoid collisions between robot and human very early the computation of collision times at predicted human-robot intersections is discussed and a switching controller for collision avoidance is proposed. In the context of the recognition of human intentions to move to certain goals, pedestrian tracks are modeled by fuzzy clustering, lanes preferred by human agents are identified, and the identification of degrees of membership of a pedestrian track to specific lanes are discussed. Computations based on simulated and experimental data show the applicability of the methods presented.