HCC: Small: Modeling Ad Hoc Collaboration on Complex Manipulation Tasks for Human-Robot Teams

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project will study how people collaborate with each other to complete complex physical tasks and investigate ways to enable robots to collaborate with people in similar tasks. Many task collaborations emerge on an ad hoc basis, with teammates making decisions about who does what parts of the task as it unfolds. Achieving similar emergent collaboration in human-robot teamwork is critical for applications such as in-home assistance, flexible manufacturing, and search-and-rescue. This project will contribute to the understanding of complex human teamwork and the fundamental technologies needed to bring about effective human-robot teams. This research will be widely disseminated, and will broaden participation in computing by mentoring teams of students with the diverse backgrounds needed to address both the human and the technical aspects of the project. To achieve these goals, this project will investigate ad hoc collaboration on complex manipulation tasks. While research on human-robot collaboration has expanded over the years, prior work has been largely limited to the investigation of small-scale tasks (e.g., tabletop manipulation), dyadic teamwork (i.e., two-person teams), and/or prescribed collaboration (e.g., tasks with predetermined roles and procedures). Through this project, the research team will 1) investigate a principled framework for describing, representing, reasoning, and enabling collaborative interactions based on rigorous modeling of human ad hoc collaboration on complex manipulation tasks; 2) develop computational methods for inferring and grounding collaborative events and actions using perception data; and 3) explore how the developed framework and reasoning capabilities may be leveraged to enable ad hoc human-robot collaboration in an experimentally constrained setting. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.