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Human-aware task planning: An application to mobile robots

Published: 03 December 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Consider a house cleaning robot planning its activities for the day. Assume that the robot expects the human inhabitant to first dress, then have breakfast, and finally go out. Then, it should plan not to clean the bedroom while the human is dressing, and to clean the kitchen after the human has had breakfast. In general, robots operating in inhabited environments, like households and future factory floors, should plan their behavior taking into account the actions that will be performed by the humans sharing the same environment. This would improve human-robot cohabitation, for example, by avoiding undesired situations for the human. Unfortunately, current task planners only consider the robot's actions and unexpected external events in the planning process, and cannot accommodate expectations about the actions of the humans.
In this article, we present a human-aware planner able to address this problem. Our planner supports alternative hypotheses of the human plan, temporal duration for the actions of both the robot and the human, constraints on the interaction between robot and human, partial goal achievement and, most importantly, the possibility to use observations of human actions in the policy generated for the robot. Our planner has been tested both as a stand-alone component and within a full framework for human-robot interaction in a real environment.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
    ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology  Volume 1, Issue 2
    November 2010
    153 pages
    ISSN:2157-6904
    EISSN:2157-6912
    DOI:10.1145/1869397
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 03 December 2010
    Accepted: 01 June 2010
    Revised: 01 June 2010
    Received: 01 March 2010
    Published in TIST Volume 1, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Human-robot interaction
    2. human-aware planning

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