Human-Robot Collaboration and Dialogue for Fault Recovery on Hierarchical Tasks

Robotic systems typically follow a rigid approach to task execution in which they perform the necessary steps in a specific order, but fail when having to cope with issues that arise during execution. To address this issue, we propose an approach that handles such cases through dialogue and human-robot collaboration. The main contribution of the proposed approach is a hierarchical control architecture that 1) autonomously detects and is cognizant of task execution failures, 2) initiates a dialogue with a human helper to obtain assistance, and 3) enables collaborative human-robot task execution through extended dialogue in order to 4) ensure robust execution of hierarchical tasks with complex constraints, such as sequential, non-ordering, and multiple paths of execution. The architecture ensures that the constraints are adhered to throughout the entire task execution, including during failures. The recovery of the architecturefrom issues during execution is validated by a human-robot team on a building task.

Role: Main mentor of undergraduate students.

Associated Publications:

• Janelle Blankenburg, Mariya Zagainova*, Stephen Michael Simmons*, Gabrielle Talavera*, Monica Nicolescu, David Feil-Seifer. “Human-Robot Collaboration and Dialogue for Fault Recovery on Hierarchical Tasks.” In International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), Golden, Colorado, USA, Nov 2020.