A novel approach to proactive human-robot cooperation

This paper introduces the concept of proactive execution of robot tasks in the context of human-robot cooperation with uncertain knowledge of the human´s intentions. We present a system architecture that defines the necessary modules of the robot and their interactions with each other. The two key modules are the intention recognition that determines the human user´s intentions and the planner that executes the appropriate tasks based on those intentions. We show how planning conflicts due to the uncertainty of the intention information are resolved by proactive execution of the corresponding task that optimally reduces the system´s uncertainly. Finally, we present an algorithm for selecting this task and suggest a benchmark scenario.