Context-specific intention awareness through web query in robotic caregiving

To provide the elderly with appropriate and timely caregiving in activities of daily life (ADL), it is desired for robots to have the capability of intention awareness (IA). Different from existing context-specific intention awareness (CSIA) approaches which are based on a limited and passive knowledge database, our approach, named `WebIA´, adopts a novel web query approach to establish a vast and active knowledge database for robots to perform CSIA. In our method, robots are endowed with comprehensive commonsense knowledge towards the correlations of the surrounding environment and human intentions. WebIA enables robots to effectively infer intentions in both trained familiar and untrained new situations. By performing several experiments, we evaluated two aspects of the WebIA approach: the effectiveness of IA in familiar situations and the self-learning ability in new situations.