An autonomous assistive robot for planning, scheduling and facilitating multi-user activities

In this paper we present the development of a novel multi-user human-robot interaction (HRI) system architecture to allow the social robot Tangy to autonomously plan, schedule and facilitate multi-user activities while considering the users´ schedules. During scheduled activities, the robot is able to interact with a group of users by providing both group-based and individualized assistance based on the current state of the activity and the needs of the individual users engaged in the social interactions. Such planning and scheduling of daily activities of a social robot while reasoning about multiple user schedules has not yet been addressed in the literature. Herein, the HRI multi-user activities we consider are a series of Bingo games. System performance experiments presented in the paper validate the use of the proposed multiuser system architecture in: 1) planning and scheduling daily Bingo games for Tangy to facilitate while considering the individual schedules of the users, and 2) determining the appropriate behaviors of the robot with respect to individuals and groups of people while providing game reminders prior to a Bingo game starting and also while facilitating the game itself.