Concurrent Plan Recognition and Execution for Human-Robot Teams

Abstract

There is a strong demand for robots to work in environments, such as aircraft manufacturing, where they share tasks with humans and must quickly adapt to each other's needs. To do so, a robot must both infer the intent of humans, and must adapt accordingly. The literature to date has made great progress on these two tasks - recognition and adaptation - but largely as separate research activities. In this paper, we present a unified approach to these two problems, in which recognition and adaptation occur concurrently and holistically. Key to our approach is a task representation that uses choice to represent alternative plans for both the human and robot, allowing a single set of algorithms to simultaneously achieve recognition and adaptation. To achieve such fluidity, a labeled propagation mechanism is used where decisions made by the human and robot during execution are propagated to relevant future open choices, as determined by causal link analysis, narrowing the possible options that the human would reasonably take (hence achieving intent recognition) as well as the possible actions the robot could consistently take (adaptation). This paper introduces Pike, an executive for human-robot teamwork that quickly adapts and infers intent based on the preconditions of actions in the plan, temporal constraints, unanticipated disturbances, and choices made previously (by either robot or human). We evaluate Pike's performance and demonstrate it on a household task in a human-robot team testbed.