Toward Achieving Formal Guarantees for Human-Aware Controllers in Human-Robot Interactions

Abstract

With the primary objective of human-robot interaction being to support humans' goals, there exists a need to formally synthesize robot controllers that can provide the desired service. Synthesis techniques have the benefit of providing formal guarantees for specification satisfaction. There is potential to apply these techniques for devising robot controllers whose specifications are coupled with human needs. This paper explores the use of formal methods to construct human-aware robot controllers to support the productivity requirements of humans. We tackle these types of scenarios via human workload-informed models and reactive synthesis. This strategy allows us to synthesize controllers that fulfill formal specifications that are expressed as linear temporal logic formulas. We present a case study in which we reason about a work delivery and pickup task such that the robot increases worker productivity, but not stress induced by high work backlog. We demonstrate our controller using the Toyota HSR, a mobile manipulator robot. The results demonstrate the realization of a robust robot controller that is guaranteed to properly reason and react in collaborative tasks with human partners.

Human-in-the-Loop Control Synthesis for Multi-Agent Systems under Hard and Soft Metric Interval Temporal Logic Specifications

“…This was discussed in [12], where a control policy was created based on data of human decisions. In [13], a model of human workload information was used to optimize the systems behaviour to balance risk of stress due to full backlogs against risk of low productivity due to empty backlogs. Here, we will instead consider humans giving input to the controllers directly through the so-called mixedinitiative control [14].…”