Demonstrating HumanTHOR: A Simulation Platform and Benchmark for Human-Robot Collaboration in a Shared Workspace

TL;DR

HumanTHOR is a new simulation platform and benchmark for human-robot collaboration in shared workspaces, enabling realistic HITL experiments via VR and supporting evaluation of robot algorithms.

Contribution

We developed HumanTHOR, a scalable simulation environment with a benchmark for everyday tasks, facilitating realistic HITL HRC research and algorithm evaluation.

Findings

Robots can effectively assist humans in collaboration tasks.

The system can evaluate different robot algorithms.

Preliminary results show room for improvement in HRC capabilities.

Abstract

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) in a shared workspace has become a common pattern in real-world robot applications and has garnered significant research interest. However, most existing studies for human-in-the-loop (HITL) collaboration with robots in a shared workspace evaluate in either simplified game environments or physical platforms, falling short in limited realistic significance or limited scalability. To support future studies, we build an embodied framework named HumanTHOR, which enables humans to act in the simulation environment through VR devices to support HITL collaborations in a shared workspace. To validate our system, we build a benchmark of everyday tasks and conduct a preliminary user study with two baseline algorithms. The results show that the robot can effectively assist humans in collaboration, demonstrating the significance of HRC. The comparison among different levels of baselines affirms that our system can adequately evaluate robot capabilities and serve as a benchmark for different robot algorithms. The experimental results also indicate that there is still much room in the area and our system can provide a preliminary foundation for future HRC research in a shared workspace. More information about the simulation environment, experiment videos, benchmark descriptions, and additional supplementary materials can be found on the website: https://sites.google.com/view/humanthor/.