Collaborative manipulation: new challenges for robotics and HRI

Abstract

Autonomous manipulation has made tremendous progress in recent years, leveraging new algorithms and capabilities of mobile manipulators to address complex human environments. However, most current systems inadequately address one key feature of human environments: that they are populated with humans. What would it take for a human and robot to prepare a meal together in a kitchen, or to assemble a part together in a manufacturing workcell?Collaboration with humans is the next frontier in robotics, be it shared workspace collaboration, assistive teleoperation and sliding autonomy, or teacher-learner collaboration, and raises new challenges for both robotics and HRI. A collaborative robot must engage in a delicate dance of prediction and action, where it must understand its collaborator's intentions, act to make its own intentions clear, decide when to assist and when to back off, as well as continuously adapt its behavior and enable customization.Addressing these challenges demands a joint effort from the HRI and robotics communities. We believe that this workshop will not only serve to attract more roboticists into the HRI community under this unifying theme, but will also create much needed collaborations to explore this rich, interdisciplinary area.