Control sharing in human-robot team interaction

Abstract

The interaction between humans and robot teams is highly relevant in many application domains, for example in collaborative manufacturing, search and rescue, and logistics. It is well-known that humans and robots have complementary capabilities: Humans are excellent in reasoning and planning in unstructured environments, while robots are very good in performing tasks repetitively and precisely. In consequence, one of the key research questions is how to combine human and robot team decision making and task execution capabilities in order to exploit their complementary skills. From a controls perspective this question boils down to how control should be shared among them. This article surveys advances in humanrobot team interaction with special attention devoted to control sharing methodologies. Additionally, aspects affecting the control sharing design, such as human behavior modeling, level of autonomy and humanmachine interfaces are identified. Open problems and future research directions towards joint decision making and task execution in human-robot teams are discussed.

Differential game theory for versatile physical human–robot interaction

“…How should a contact robot be controlled to provide a stable and appropriate response to a user with unknown dynamics during various activities ranging from sport training, to physical rehabilitation and shared driving [8,9,10]? Specific human-robot interactions have been studied [11,12] but a general framework for interactive control is still missing. It has been suggested that differential game theory (GT) can be used as a framework to describe various interactive behaviors between a robot and its human user [13].…”

Symbiotic human-robot collaborative assembly

“…Adaptive robots and intuitive humans are able to reassign leader/follower roles on-the-fly. With some few exceptions [24,177], recent research assumes that the roles are assigned before task execution. Fig.…”

“… Collaboration is the joint activity of humans and robots in a shared workspace, with the definite objective to accomplish together a set of given working tasks. It requires typically a coordinated, synchronous activity from all parties [177] where physical contact is also allowed. In any case, collaboration assumes a joint, focused goal-oriented activity from the parties who share their different capabilities, competences and resources.…”

Examining the myths of connected and autonomous vehicles: analysing the pathway to a driverless mobility paradigm

“…Predicting and adjusting in real-time to human behaviour and 'communicating' effectively with a human passenger is a task that no machine has mastered yet, possibly because for now at least, humans and machines speak different languages. Humans are excellent in reasoning and planning in unstructured environments, while robots are very good in performing tasks repetitively and precisely (Musić and Hirche, 2017). Also the transition to CAVs will require currently available connectivity to give way to more advanced cooperative features that will facilitate safety and traffic information exchange among vehicles and infrastructure as Raposo et al (2017) suggested.…”