Mind-Theoretic Planning for Social Robots

As robots move out of factory floors and into human environments, out from safe barricaded workstations to operating in close proximity with people, they will in-creasingly be expected to understand and coordinate with basic aspects of human behavior. If they are to become useful and productive participants in human-robot teams, they will require effective methods of modeling their human counterparts in order to better coordinate and cooperate with them. Theory of Mind (ToM) is defined as people's ability to reason about others ' be-havior in terms of their internal states, such as beliefs and desires. Having a ToM allows an individual to understand the observed behavior of others, based not only on directly observable perceptual features but also an understanding of underlying men-tal states; this understanding allows the individual to anticipate and better react to future actions. In this thesis a Mind-Theoretic Planning (MTP) system is presented which attempts to provide robots with some of the basic ToM abilities that people rely on for coordinating and interacting with others