Robust Robot Planning for Human-Robot Collaboration

In human-robot collaboration, the objectives of the human are often unknown to the robot. Moreover, even assuming a known objective, the human behavior is also uncertain. In order to plan a robust robot behavior, a key preliminary question is then: How to derive realistic human behaviors given a known objective? A major issue is that such a human behavior should itself account for the robot behavior, otherwise collaboration cannot happen. In this paper, we rely on Markov decision models, representing the uncertainty over the human objective as a probability distribution over a finite set of objective functions (inducing a distribution over human behaviors). Based on this, we propose two contributions: 1) an approach to automatically generate an uncertain human behavior (a policy) for each given objective function while accounting for possible robot behaviors; and 2) a robot planning algorithm that is robust to the above-mentioned uncertainties and relies on solving a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) obtained by reasoning on a distribution over human behaviors. A co-working scenario allows conducting experiments and presenting qualitative and quantitative results to evaluate our approach.

Authors

• Yang You 0003
• Vincent Thomas
• Francis Colas
• Rachid Alami 0001
• Olivier Buffet

Keywords

• Uncertainty
• Collaboration
• Markov processes
• Linear programming
• Behavioral sciences
• Planning
• Power capacitors
• Human-robot Collaboration
• Planning Of Robots
• Robust Robot
• Human Behavior
• Qualitative Results
• Markov Decision Process
• Partial Observation
• Robot Behavior
• Uncertain Behavior
• Human Subjects
• Human Activities
• Actual Behavior
• Optimal Policy
• Best Response
• Mental Models
• Decision Problem
• Reward Function
• Local Devices
• Actual Object
• Optimal Action
• Robust Policy
• State Of The Device
• Collaborative Behavior
• Human Preferences
• Collaborative Tasks
• Optimal Value Function
• Joint Policy
• Robot Localization
• Collaborative Problem
• Human Observers