Anticipatory Planning for Human-Robot Teams

Abstract. When robots work alongside humans for performing collab-orative tasks, they need to be able to anticipate human’s future actions and plan appropriate actions. The tasks we consider are performed in contextually-rich environments containing objects, and there is a large variation in the way humans perform these tasks. We use a graphical model to represent the state-space, where we model the humans through their low-level kinematics as well as their high-level intent, and model their interactions with the objects through physically-grounded object a↵ordances. This allows our model to anticipate a belief about possible future human actions, and we model the human’s and robot’s behavior through an MDP in this rich state-space. We further discuss that due to perception errors and the limitations of the model, the human may not take the optimal action and therefore we present robot’s anticipatory planning with di↵erent behaviors of the human within the model’s scope. In experiments on Cornell Activity Dataset, we show that our method performs better than various baselines for collaborative planning