Tractable probabilistic models for intention recognition based on expert knowledge

Intention recognition is an important topic in human-robot cooperation that can be tackled using probabilistic model-based methods. A popular instance of such methods are Bayesian networks where the dependencies between random variables are modeled by means of a directed graph. Bayesian networks are very efficient for treating networks with conditionally independent parts. Unfortunately, such independence sometimes has to be constructed by introducing so called hidden variables with an intractably large state space. An example are human actions which depend on human intentions and on other human actions. Our goal in this paper is to find models for intention-action mapping with a reduced state space in order to allow for tractable on-line evaluation. We present a systematic derivation of the reduced model and experimental results of recognizing the intention of a real human in a virtual environment.