A Hierarchical Architecture for Human-Robot Cooperation Processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces FlexHRC+, a hierarchical architecture for human-robot cooperation that enhances robot autonomy in variable shop-floor tasks through decision-making and formal action representation.

Contribution

It presents a novel hierarchical architecture with in-the-loop decision making and formal logic-based action representation for improved human-robot collaboration.

Findings

Successful implementation in furniture assembly tasks

Enhanced robot decision-making capabilities

Formal verification of robot actions

Abstract

In this paper we propose FlexHRC+, a hierarchical human-robot cooperation architecture designed to provide collaborative robots with an extended degree of autonomy when supporting human operators in high-variability shop-floor tasks. The architecture encompasses three levels, namely for perception, representation, and action. Building up on previous work, here we focus on (i) an in-the-loop decision making process for the operations of collaborative robots coping with the variability of actions carried out by human operators, and (ii) the representation level, integrating a hierarchical AND/OR graph whose online behaviour is formally specified using First Order Logic. The architecture is accompanied by experiments including collaborative furniture assembly and object positioning tasks.