A Human-Aware Task Planner Explicitly Reasoning About Human and Robot Decision, Action and Reaction

The complexity of the tasks autonomous robots can tackle is constantly increasing, yet we seldom see robots interacting with humans to perform tasks. Indeed, humans are either requested for punctual help or given the lead on the whole task. We propose a human-aware task planning approach allowing the robot to plan for a task while also considering and emulating the human decision, action, and reaction processes. Our approach is based on the exploration of multiple hierarchical tasks networks albeit differently whether the agent is considered to be controllable (the robot) or uncontrollable (the human(s)). We present the rationale of our approach along with a formalization and show its potential on an illustrative example involving the assembly of a table by a robot and a human.

Automated summary

This study proposes a human-aware task planning approach for robots to consider and emulate human decision, action, and reaction processes. By exploring multiple hierarchical task networks, the roles of robot and human are categorized as controllable and uncontrollable, showing the potential of the method in an illustrative example of the collaborative assembly of a table by a robot and a human.