Planning for Human-Robot Teaming

One of the most important applications of planning technol-ogy has been – and continues to be – guiding robotic agents in an autonomous fashion through complex problem scenarios. Increasingly, real-world scenarios are evolving in a way that includes humans as actors in the loop along with the robot and the planning system. These humans are stakeholders whose roles may vary between that of a commander or a system or domain expert; the one common thread is that together with the robot, they form a team that shares common goals. In this paper, we consider challenges posed by such human-robot teaming scenarios from a purely planning-centric per-spective, and discuss the dimensions of variation within ap-plication problems in such scenarios. We seek to differenti-ate planning for human-robot teaming from the general area of human-robot interaction, since we are mainly interested in the planning tools that facilitate such teaming. We look at some problems that are encountered in deploying existing planning techniques in such teaming scenarios, and illustrate these with our experience in a real world search and rescue scenario. We follow this up with results from runs involving a robot controlled by a planner whose goal handling capabil-ities are augmented