Adaptive Planning with Evidence Based Prediction for Improved Fluency in Routine Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

Abstract

This thesis work intends to explore the development of a shared mental model between an autonomous agent and a human, where we aim to promote fluency in continuing interactions defined by repetitive tasks. That is, with repetitive actions, experimentation and increasing iterations, we wish the robot to learn how its own behavior affects that of its partner. To accomplish this, we propose a model that encodes both human and robot actions in a probabilistic space describing the temporal transition points between activities. The purpose of such a model is not only in passive predictive power (understanding the future actions of an associate), but also to encode the latent effect of a robot’s action on the future actions of the associate.