- Yang You ORCID:orcid.org/0009-0005-2989-555110,
- Vincent Thomas ORCID:orcid.org/0000-0003-3401-464911,
- Francis Colas ORCID:orcid.org/0000-0002-7449-767611,
- Robert Skilton ORCID:orcid.org/0000-0003-1076-906X10 &
- …
- Olivier Buffet ORCID:orcid.org/0000-0002-5072-585711
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Abstract
Human-robot collaboration often necessitates the robot to adapt to the uncertainty of human objectives and their induced behaviors. This may require the robot to have a human model to anticipate human partners’ objectives and predict their actions, which is typically learned by the robot through available human data. However, in complex collaboration tasks, a chicken-and-egg problem arises because human data cannot be collected without a collaborative robot policy in the first place. In this article, we describe the human-robot collaboration task with Markov decision models and solve the chicken-and-egg problem by proposing an online robot planning algorithm. This online framework can automatically derive a human model without real human data and plan robust robot actions to support human partners with respect to their uncertain objectives and behaviors. Through experiments with a human-robot co-working scenario, we demonstrate that our online method outperforms the previous offline approach in terms of scalability and the ability to plan robot actions within a bounded time.
This work has been supported by the EPSRC Energy Programme under UKAEA/EPSRC Fusion Grant 2022/2027 No. EP/W006839/1 and by French National Research Agency (ANR) through the “Flying Coworker” Project under Grant 18-CE33-0001.
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Authors and Affiliations
Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE), United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Culham, UK
Yang You & Robert Skilton
Université de Lorraine, INRIA, CNRS, LORIA, Nancy, France
Vincent Thomas, Francis Colas & Olivier Buffet
- Yang You
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Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Brunel University London, London, UK
M. Nazmul Huda
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UK
Mingfeng Wang
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Brunel University London, London, UK
Tatiana Kalganova
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You, Y., Thomas, V., Colas, F., Skilton, R., Buffet, O. (2025). Online Robust Robot Planning for Human-Robot Collaboration. In: Huda, M.N., Wang, M., Kalganova, T. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 15052. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72062-8_1
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