A game-based model for human-robots interaction

Abstract

Game theory has exhibited to be a fruitful metaphor to reason about multi-player systems. Two kinds of games are mainly studied and adopted: turn-based and concurrent. They differ on the way the players are allowed to move. However, in real scenarios, there are very simple interplays among players whose modeling does not fit well in any of these settings. In this paper we introduce a novel game-based framework to model and reason about the interaction between robots and humans. This framework combines all positive features of both turn-based and concurrent games. Over this game model we study the reachability problem. To give an evidence of the usefulness of the introduced framework, we use it to model the interaction between a human and a team of two robots, in which the former tries to run away from the latter. We also provide an algorithm that decides in polynomial time whether at least one robot catches the human.