3D Visibility Check in Webots for Human Perspective Taking in Human-Robot Interaction

The rapid development of intelligent robotics would facilitate humans and robots will live and work together at a human workspace in the near future. It means research on effective human-robot interaction is essential for future robotics. The most common situation of humanrobot interaction is that humans and robots work cooperatively, and robots should give proper assistance to humans for achieving a goal. In the workspace there are several objects including tools and a robot should identify the human intended objects or tools. There might be situational differences between a robot’s perspective and a human perspective because of several obstacles in environment. Thus, a robot needs to take the human perspective and simulates the situation from the human perspective to identify the human intended object. For human perspective taking, first of all a robot needs to check its own visibility for the environment. To address this challenge, this paper develops a 3D visibility check method by using a depth image in Webots. By using the developed method, a robot can determine whether each point in the environment is visible or invisible at its posture and detect objects if they are visible.