Fuzzy Object Ambiguity Determination and Human Attention Assessment for Domestic Service Robots

Domestic service robots have the promising potential of bringing significant services to the general population, and more importantly, successful applications of universal domestic service robots can potentially help mitigate critical societal issues such as senior care. In order to do so, domestic service robots need to integrate seamlessly into home environments. However, home environments are dynamic, complex and filled with personal items. Therefore, ambiguity can quickly arise for robots operating in such rich environments. In this paper, we propose an object ambiguity determination system that can determine the level of ambiguity in robot object selection tasks with fuzzy logic data integration. Additionally, we propose a functional human attention assessment system with fuzzy logic that enables the robot to determine user attention before committing to general disambiguation processes. Our preliminary results show that the proposed fuzzy logic inference systems can reliably estimate the robot object selection task ambiguity from object confidence level and the number of potential target objects that satisfy the user's command. Furthermore, fuzzy inference is applied to decide human eye gaze direction robustly. These subsystems can be utilized in the context of human-robot interaction to guide the robot when to seek feedback from a human partner in order to disambiguate reference in domestic service tasks. The source code of all proposed systems is available publicly on GitHub.1