Joint Communication and Motion Planning for Cobots

The increasing deployment of robots in co-working scenarios with humans has revealed complex safety and efficiency challenges in the computation robot behavior. Movement among humans is one of the most fundamental -- and yet critical -- problems in this frontier. While several approaches have addres...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2022-03
Main Authors: Dadvar, Mehdi, Keyvan Majd, Oikonomou, Elena, Fainekos, Georgios, Srivastava, Siddharth
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communication
Cost function
Human motion
Motion planning
Robot dynamics
Robots
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The increasing deployment of robots in co-working scenarios with humans has revealed complex safety and efficiency challenges in the computation robot behavior. Movement among humans is one of the most fundamental -- and yet critical -- problems in this frontier. While several approaches have addressed this problem from a purely navigational point of view, the absence of a unified paradigm for communicating with humans limits their ability to prevent deadlocks and compute feasible solutions. This paper presents a joint communication and motion planning framework that selects from an arbitrary input set of robot's communication signals while computing robot motion plans. It models a human co-worker's imperfect perception of these communications using a noisy sensor model and facilitates the specification of a variety of social/workplace compliance priorities with a flexible cost function. Theoretical results and simulator-based empirical evaluations show that our approach efficiently computes motion plans and communication strategies that reduce conflicts between agents and resolve potential deadlocks.
ISSN:2331-8422