Robots navigating in a social way should reason about people intentions
when acting. For instance, in applications like robot guidance or meeting with a
person, the robot has to consider the goals of the people. Intentions are inherently nonobservable,
and thus we propose Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes
(POMDPs) as a decision-making tool for these applications. One of the issues with
POMDPs is that the prediction models are usually handcrafted. In this paper, we use
machine learning techniques to build prediction models from observations. A novel
technique is employed to discover points of interest (goals) in the environment, and a
variant of Growing Hidden Markov Models (GHMMs) is used to learn the transition
probabilities of the POMDP. The approach is applied to an autonomous telepresence
robot
