Human-Robot Mutual Adaptation in Shared Autonomy

• Published in: 2017 12th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI Vol. 2017; pp. 294 - 302
• Main Authors: Nikolaidis, Stefanos, Zhu, Yu Xiang, Hsu, David, Srinivasa, Siddhartha
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.03.2017
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Collaboration; Computer systems organization > Embedded and cyber-physical systems > Robotics > Robotic autonomy; Computer systems organization > Embedded and cyber-physical systems > Robotics > Robotic control; Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence > Planning and scheduling > Planning under uncertainty; Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence > Planning and scheduling > Robotic planning; History; Manipulators; Task analysis; Uncertainty; human-robot mutual adaptation; shared autonomy; planning under uncertainty
• ISBN: 9781450343367; 1450343368
• ISSN: 2167-2148
• DOI: 10.1145/2909824.3020252

Shared autonomy integrates user input with robot autonomy in order to control a robot and help the user to complete a task. Our work aims to improve the performance of such a human-robot team: the robot tries to guide the human towards an effective strategy, sometimes against the human's own preference, while still retaining his trust. We achieve this through a principled human-robot mutual adaptation formalism. We integrate a bounded-memory adaptation model of the human into a partially observable stochastic decision model, which enables the robot to adapt to an adaptable human. When the human is adaptable, the robot guides the human towards a good strategy, maybe unknown to the human in advance. When the human is stubborn and not adaptable, the robot complies with the human's preference in order to retain their trust. In the shared autonomy setting, unlike many other common human-robot collaboration settings, only the robot actions can change the physical state of the world, and the human and robot goals are not fully observable. We address these challenges and show in a human subject experiment that the proposed mutual adaptation formalism improves human-robot team performance, while retaining a high level of user trust in the robot, compared to the common approach of having the robot strictly following participants' preference.