What’s on your mind?

A team of engineers specialising in cognitive sciences, robotics and psychology have developed a robot which can – they claim – predict human intentions. The move could be a step towards making human-robot interaction more natural.

The work is a product of the EU-funded JAST project which brings teams together from different backgrounds.

Working on the principle of ‘mirror neurons’ whereby neurons resonate when they are mimicking activity, the JAST engineers have built a system whereby robots can observe and make sense of a human action.

Explaining how the robots work, Wolfram Erlhagen from the University of Minho and one of the project consortium's research partners, said: “In our experiments the robot is not observing to learn a task. The JAST robots already know the task, but they observe behaviour, map it against the task, and quickly learn to anticipate [partner actions] or spot errors when the partner does not follow the correct or expected procedure.”

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