Authoring and Operating Humanoid Behaviors On the Fly using Coactive Design Principles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for quickly authoring and operating humanoid robot behaviors interactively using Coactive Design principles, enabling real-time task execution on hardware.

Contribution

It applies Affordance Templates and Coactive Design to develop an interactive system for on-the-fly humanoid robot behavior authoring and operation.

Findings

Successful real-time behavior authoring on Nadia robot

Timings for door traversal and pick-and-place tasks

Interdependence analysis for task planning

Abstract

Humanoid robots have the potential to perform useful tasks in a world built for humans. However, communicating intention and teaming with a humanoid robot is a multi-faceted and complex problem. In this paper, we tackle the problems associated with quickly and interactively authoring new robot behavior that works on real hardware. We bring the powerful concepts of Affordance Templates and Coactive Design methodology to this problem to attempt to solve and explain it. In our approach we use interactive stance and hand pose goals along with other types of actions to author humanoid robot behavior on the fly. We then describe how our operator interface works to author behaviors on the fly and provide interdependence analysis charts for task approach and door opening. We present timings from real robot performances for traversing a push door and doing a pick and place task on our Nadia humanoid robot.