SRAC: Self-Reflective Risk-Aware Artificial Cognitive models for robot response to human activities

In human-robot teaming, interpretation of human actions, recognition of new situations, and appropriate decision making are crucial abilities for cooperative robots (“co-robots”) to interact intelligently with humans. Given an observation, it is important that human activities are interpreted the same way by co-robots as human peers so that robot actions can be appropriate to the activity at hand. A novel interpretability indicator is introduced to address this issue. When a robot encounters a new scenario, the pretrained activity recognition model, no matter how accurate in a known situation, may not produce the correct information necessary to act appropriately and safely in new situations. To effectively and safely interact with people, we introduce a new generalizability indicator that allows a co-robot to self-reflect and reason about when an observation falls outside the co-robot's learned model. Based on topic modeling and the two novel indicators, we propose a new Self-reflective Risk-aware Artificial Cognitive (SRAC) model, which allows a robot to make better decisions by incorporating robot action risks and identifying new situations. Experiments both using real-world datasets and on physical robots suggest that our SRAC model significantly outperforms the traditional methodology and enables better decision making in response to human behaviors.