Designing Human-Robot Coexistence Space

TL;DR

This paper presents a computational framework for designing human-robot coexistence spaces, optimizing object layouts to enhance safety, comfort, and robot efficiency, demonstrated through autonomous wheelchair scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel motion planning-based design method that quickly generates optimal room layouts considering human preferences and robot navigation constraints.

Findings

Designs are generated in 3-5 minutes, significantly faster than traditional methods.

The framework produces reasonable layouts even in tight spaces.

It accommodates diverse user preferences effectively.

Abstract

When the human-robot interactions become ubiquitous, the environment surrounding these interactions will have significant impact on the safety and comfort of the human and the effectiveness and efficiency of the robot. Although most robots are designed to work in the spaces created for humans, many environments, such as living rooms and offices, can be and should be redesigned to enhance and improve human-robot collaboration and interactions. This work uses autonomous wheelchair as an example and investigates the computational design in the human-robot coexistence spaces. Given the room size and the objects $O$ in the room, the proposed framework computes the optimal layouts of $O$ that satisfy both human preferences and navigation constraints of the wheelchair. The key enabling technique is a motion planner that can efficiently evaluate hundreds of similar motion planning problems. Our implementation shows that the proposed framework can produce a design around three to five minutes on average comparing to 10 to 20 minutes without the proposed motion planner. Our results also show that the proposed method produces reasonable designs even for tight spaces and for users with different preferences.