Synergistic Scheduling of Learning and Allocation of Tasks in Human-Robot Teams - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Synergistic Scheduling of Learning and Allocation of Tasks in Human-Robot Teams

Conference Paper, Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May, 2022

Abstract

We consider the problem of completing a set of n tasks with a human-robot team using minimum effort. In many domains, teaching a robot to be fully autonomous can be counterproductive if there are finitely many tasks to be done. Rather, the optimal strategy is to weigh the cost of teaching a robot and its benefit- how many new tasks it allows the robot to solve autonomously. We formulate this as a planning problem where the goal is to decide what tasks the robot should do autonomously (act), what tasks should be delegated to a human (delegate) and what tasks the robot should be taught (learn) so as to complete all the given tasks with minimum effort. This planning problem results in a search tree that grows exponentially with n – making standard graph search algorithms intractable. We address this by converting the problem into a mixed integer program that can be solved efficiently using off-the-shelf solvers with bounds on solution quality. To predict the benefit of learning, we propose a precondition prediction classifier. Given two tasks, this classifier predicts whether a skill trained on one will transfer to the other. Finally, we evaluate our approach on peg insertion and Lego stacking tasks, both in simulation and real-world, showing substantial savings in human effort.

BibTeX

@conference{Vats-2022-132162,
author = {Shivam Vats and Oliver Kroemer and Maxim Likhachev},
title = {Synergistic Scheduling of Learning and Allocation of Tasks in Human-Robot Teams},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2022},
month = {May},
keywords = {Human-robot Team,Manipulation,Collaborative Manufacturing},
}