Create Plan Correct Plan Interactively

We present the principles, current work and plans for the EU-FP7 Project Semi Autonomous 3rd-Hand Robot. In this project, we pursue a breakthrough in flexible manufac-turing by developing a symbiotic robot assistant that acts as a third hand of a human worker. It will be straightfor-ward to instruct even by untrained workers and allow for efficient knowledge transfer between tasks. We demonstrate its efficiency in the collaborative assembly of furniture. Approach Current robots in real-world industrial applications are either preprogrammed or teleoperated, with only few ex-ceptions, lacking any autonomy at all. At the other extreme, the field of artificial intelligence has so far been unable to endow robots with full autonomy, and the prospect of fully-autonomous robots is uncertain at best. We challenge the current thinking in industry and academia on both the future of robotics and artificial intelligence as well as on the nature of the long-awaited robotic killer application by suggesting that a promising alternative, achievable in the foreseeable future, lies between these extremes. The alternative we propose is semi-autonomous human-robot collaboration. This new robotics paradigm is likely to result in a class of robotic systems that are proactive, can be programmed and commanded by instruction, are capa-ble of skill self-assessment, and have an explicit model of team behavior. These principles will allow a revolution in the way humans and robots work together by changing the usual way we program and interact with robots: Instruction replaces Programming. Under frequent oc-currences of new situations, it is not possible to program each new task with abstract programming languages. In-stead, intuitive programing methods must be devised. Our instruction framework generalizes learning from demon-stration, active learning, mutual adaptation, and huma