Abstract
Assistant robots like robotic wheelchairs can perform an effective and valuable work in our daily lives. However, they eventually may need external help from humans in the robot environment (particularly, the driver in the case of a wheelchair) to accomplish safely and efficiently some tricky tasks for the current technology, i.e. opening a locked door, traversing a crowded area, etc. This article proposes a control architecture for assistant robots designed under a multi‐agent perspective that facilitates the participation of humans into the robotic system and improves the overall performance of the robot as well as its dependability. Within our design, agents have their own intentions and beliefs, have different abilities (that include algorithmic behaviours and human skills) and also learn autonomously the most convenient method to carry out their actions through reinforcement learning. The proposed architecture is illustrated with a real assistant robot: a robotic wheelchair that provides mobility to impaired or elderly people.
Highlights
The assistant robotics field covers those applications where a mobile robot helps humans to perform certain tasks
Robots that operate in human environments, especially in assistant robotic applications, may allow the researchers to relax somehow the typical autonomy requirements of a conventional robotic platform
Human–robot interaction is considered as just a simple communication between the robot architecture and the human
Summary
The assistant robotics field covers those applications where a mobile robot helps humans to perform certain tasks. The presence of a robot within human scenarios like houses, offices, public facilities, etc., imposes a high degree of operation robustness and physical safety for humans as well as a sophisticated set of robot capabilities like manoeuvring within narrow and/or crowded spaces, avoiding mobile obstacles, docking, etc. Planning tasks in such complex and typically large environments. These issues are usually beyond the capabilities that the current technology offers, so the use of assistant robots operating autonomously within human environments is not yet extended. In the tele-operation area, whose applications can be seen close to assistant applications, collaborative control (Fong and Thorpe 2002) is used to
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