# Robust Robot Planning for Human-Robot Collaboration

## TL;DR

This paper develops a robust robot planning method for human-robot collaboration by modeling uncertain human behaviors with Markov decision processes and planning with POMDPs to handle these uncertainties.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to generate uncertain human behavior models and a robot planning algorithm that accounts for these uncertainties using POMDPs.

## Key findings

- The approach effectively models realistic human behaviors under uncertainty.
- The robot planning algorithm demonstrates robustness in collaborative scenarios.
- Experimental results validate the method's ability to handle human behavior variability.

## Abstract

In human-robot collaboration, the objectives of the human are often unknown to the robot. Moreover, even assuming a known objective, the human behavior is also uncertain. In order to plan a robust robot behavior, a key preliminary question is then: How to derive realistic human behaviors given a known objective? A major issue is that such a human behavior should itself account for the robot behavior, otherwise collaboration cannot happen. In this paper, we rely on Markov decision models, representing the uncertainty over the human objective as a probability distribution over a finite set of objective functions (inducing a distribution over human behaviors). Based on this, we propose two contributions: 1) an approach to automatically generate an uncertain human behavior (a policy) for each given objective function while accounting for possible robot behaviors; and 2) a robot planning algorithm that is robust to the above-mentioned uncertainties and relies on solving a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) obtained by reasoning on a distribution over human behaviors. A co-working scenario allows conducting experiments and presenting qualitative and quantitative results to evaluate our approach.