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

Abstract

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.