It Takes Two: Learning to Plan for Human-Robot Cooperative Carrying

TL;DR

This paper introduces a VRNN-based planning method for human-robot cooperative carrying tasks, demonstrating improved human-likeness and task performance over traditional planning methods through simulation and real-world experiments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel VRNN approach for predicting human-robot trajectories, enhancing cooperation by modeling interaction history and generating human-like motion plans.

Findings

VRNN generates motion similar to human demonstrations

VRNN outperforms RRT in task-related metrics

Participants perceive VRNN-planned robots as more human-like

Abstract

Cooperative table-carrying is a complex task due to the continuous nature of the action and state-spaces, multimodality of strategies, and the need for instantaneous adaptation to other agents. In this work, we present a method for predicting realistic motion plans for cooperative human-robot teams on the task. Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network (VRNN) to model the variation in the trajectory of a human-robot team across time, we are able to capture the distribution over the team's future states while leveraging information from interaction history. The key to our approach is leveraging human demonstration data to generate trajectories that synergize well with humans during test time in a receding horizon fashion. Comparison between a baseline, sampling-based planner RRT (Rapidly-exploring Random Trees) and the VRNN planner in centralized planning shows that the VRNN generates motion more similar to the distribution of human-human demonstrations than the RRT. Results in a human-in-the-loop user study show that the VRNN planner outperforms decentralized RRT on task-related metrics, and is significantly more likely to be perceived as human than the RRT planner. Finally, we demonstrate the VRNN planner on a real robot paired with a human teleoperating another robot.