Coordinating flexible human-robot teams by local world state observation

Abstract

We envision a system that treats humans and robots as equal partners in achieving a common goal. Equality of agents offers high flexibility through dynamic task allocation and flexible team composition, but thereby complicates the coordination of robots with human actions. We contribute a formal framework and system architecture that integrates planning of perception operations into dynamic plan execution to recognize whether subtasks have already been carried out by another agent or are ready to be executed by the robot. This is achieved by locally observing the world state with robot-mounted sensors to evaluate pre- and postconditions linked to every operation of the task. Our approach is prepared to handle arbitrary teams of multiple humans and robots. Experiments show, that our prototype is able to coordinate a stationary robot arm with human actions in pick-and-place tasks formulated as precedence graphs.