Action parsing and goal inference using self as simulator

Abstract

The ability to understand a teammate's actions in terms of goals and other mental states is an important element of cooperative behavior. Simulation theory argues in favor of an embodied approach whereby humans reuse parts of their cognitive structure for not only generating behavior, but also for simulating the mental states responsible for generating that behavior in others. We present our simulation-theoretic approach and demonstrates its performance in a collaborative task scenario. The robot offers its human teammate assistance by either inferring the human's belief states to anticipate their informational needs, or inferring the human's goal states to physically help the human achieve those goals.