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

TL;DR

This paper presents a planning framework for human-robot teams to efficiently decide task allocation, delegation, and learning to minimize human effort in completing multiple tasks, using mixed integer programming and transfer prediction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel planning formulation that balances teaching and delegation, and employs a classifier to predict skill transfer, enabling efficient task scheduling in human-robot teams.

Findings

Substantial reduction in human effort in peg insertion and Lego stacking tasks.

Effective mixed integer programming approach for task planning.

Successful real-world and simulation validation of the method.

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.