Robots Influencing Humans to Reveal their Goals during Collaboration and Competition

Abstract

We propose a unified strategy for fast goal inference in human-robot interaction. The core idea is to drive the human toward Critical Decision Points (CDPs)-states where competing human strategies prescribe different next actions and thus maximally reveal the goal. We formalise CDPs using a goal-conditioned policy divergence measure and incorporate them into a Receding-Horizon Planner that explores future action sequences while optimizing a cost function balancing task progress and information gain. We evaluate this approach in both a collaborative, fully observable cooking task and a competitive, partially observable hide-and-seek game, each in simulation and on real robots. In both scenarios, our method infers human goals more accurately and earlier than baseline strategies.