Planning for serendipity

Recently there has been a lot of focus on human robot co-habitation issues that are often orthogonal to many aspects of human-robot teaming; e. g. on producing socially acceptable behaviors of robots and de-conflicting plans of robots and humans in shared environments. However, an interesting offshoot of these settings that has largely been overlooked is the problem of planning for serendipity - i. e. planning for stigmergic collaboration without explicit commitments on agents in co-habitation. In this paper we formalize this notion of planning for serendipity for the first time, and provide an Integer Programming based solution for this problem. Further, we illustrate the different modes of this planning technique on a typical Urban Search and Rescue scenario and show a real-life implementation of the ideas on the Nao Robot interacting with a human colleague.

Authors

• Tathagata Chakraborti
• Gordon Briggs
• Kartik Talamadupula
• Yu Zhang 0055
• Matthias Scheutz
• David E. Smith 0001
• Subbarao Kambhampati

Keywords

• Planning
• Robot kinematics
• Collaboration
• Context
• Robot sensing systems
• Handover
• Serendipitous
• Human Robot
• Global Status
• Actual Cost
• Individual Plans
• Optimal Plan
• Original Plan
• Autonomous Agents
• Exogenous Effects
• Planning Horizon
• Execution Plan
• Robotic Agents
• Lesser Cost