Intention aware interactive multi-modal robot programming

As robots enter the human environment, there are increasing needs for novice users to be able to program robots with ease. A successful robot programming system should be intuitive, interactive, and intention aware. Intuitiveness refers to the use of intuitive user interfaces such as speech and hand gestures. Interactivity refers to the system's ability to let the user interact preemptively with the robot to take its control at any given time. Intention awareness refers to the system's ability to recognize and adapt to user intent. This paper focuses on the intention awareness problem for interactive multi-modal robot programming system. In our framework, user intent takes on the form of a robot program, which in our context is a sequential set of commands with parameters. To solve the intention recognition and adaptation problem, the system converts robot programs into a set of Markov chains. The system can then deduce the most likely program the user intends to execute based on a given observation sequence. It then adapts this program based on additional interaction. The system is implemented on a mobile vacuum cleaning robot with a user who is wearing sensor gloves, inductive position sensors, and a microphone.