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

## TL;DR

This paper develops formal methods to synthesize human-aware robot controllers that support human productivity and well-being, demonstrated through a case study with a mobile robot ensuring task efficiency and stress reduction.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining formal synthesis with human workload models to create controllers that guarantee adherence to human-centric specifications.

## Key findings

- Successfully synthesized a controller for a work delivery task.
- Demonstrated the controller's ability to balance productivity and stress.
- Validated robustness of the controller in real-world scenarios.

## 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.