Bayesian Intention for Enhanced Human Robot Collaboration

Predicting human intent is challenging yet essential to achieving seamless Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). Many existing approaches fail to fully exploit the inherent relationships between objects, tasks, and the human model. Current methods for predicting human intent, such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), often lack interpretability due to their failure to account for causal relationships between variables. To address these challenges, in this paper, we developed a novel Bayesian Intention (BI) framework to predict human intent within a multi-modality information framework in HRC scenarios. This framework captures the complexity of intent prediction by modeling the correlations between human behavior conventions and scene data. Our framework leverages these inferred intent predictions to optimize the robot's response in real-time, enabling smoother and more intuitive collaboration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a HRC task involving a UR5 robot, highlighting BI's capability for real-time human intent prediction and collision avoidance using a unique dataset we created. Our evaluations show that the multi-modality BI model predicts human intent within 2.69ms, with a 36% increase in precision, a 60% increase in F1 Score, and an 85% increase in accuracy compared to its best baseline method. The results underscore BI's potential to advance real-time human intent prediction and collision avoidance, making a significant contribution to the field of HRC.