hi everyone my name is karthik and i'm a
phd student in the dgp lab at the
university of toronto
today i'm presenting our work on task
allocation for human robot collaboration
in human robot collaboration humans and
robots work together to achieve a common
goal
one of the many challenges in hrc is
determining what actions each member of
the team should take
a problem known as task allocation
prior work has proposed many solutions
to task allocation
for instance using offline or online
planning methods which prescribe what
the human and the robot should work on
during the task
however sometimes it is hard to pre-plan
all aspects of an hrc before the task
commences
and humans may want to make changes to
the task allocations in an ad hoc
fashion
hence prior work has proposed behaviors
that the robot can use to facilitate
ad-hoc collaboration
for example the robot can respond to
user instructions in a reactive manner
or the robot can infer allocations such
as by picking up objects near its
gripper in a proactive manner
we take inspiration from ad-hoc hrc and
coordination behaviors exhibited by
human teams
such as the notion of territoriality and
proximity
and hci work on designing interactions
with proxemics in mind
tabletop territoriality describes how
collaborators distribute resources in
the shared workspace
while working on a task proxemic
interaction states that we can exploit
physical and spatial relationships with
objects
to enable fluent and natural
interactions with them
in our work we make two contributions a
design space of novel task allocation
techniques for ad hoc hrc
and a comprehensive evaluation of the
design space
we propose three new explicit techniques
where allocation occurs through
deliberate user action
and three new implicit techniques where
the robot allocates objects to itself
based on simple heuristics
our first technique is called menu where
the user can touch or point at an object
to bring up an allocation menu
the second technique is called subtle
relocation through which the user can
push an object towards the robot to
assign it
the last technique is called fixed
territories where the tabletop is
divided into territories belonging to
the user
the robot and the group objects change
allocation based on where they're
located on the table
our first implicit technique is called
distance where the robot allocates
objects based on how far away they are
from its base
the second technique is called gaze
where user gaze triggers territories
which the robot avoids picking up
objects from
and robot territories which it actively
picks up objects from
and the last implicit technique which is
called proximity where territories
are formed when the user or the robot
picks up objects from a region
subsequently the robot avoids picking up
objects from the user's territory
and only picks up objects from its own
territory
we evaluated the techniques on a set of
block stacking tasks where the user
manipulated yellow blocks and the robot
manipulated black blocks
we studied coupled tasks where the user
and the robot had to place blocks
alternatively to complete a structure
and decoupled tasks where the user and
the robot could independently complete
their own structures
we also studied object placement objects
for the user and the robot could be
scattered around the workspace
or they could be pre-sorted
here are some clips from the user study
we found that implicit techniques led to
faster task completion times
led to increased concurrent activity or
simultaneous time spent by the user
and the robot on the task led to
increased robot
errors or incorrect allocations
led to an increased perception of being
able to parallelize
or work on the task and allocate objects
simultaneously
and finally led to a reduced perception
of being in control over task allocation
based on these findings we think that
future task allocation could be improved
by building implicit allocation
techniques with explicit control
mechanisms
for example in the proximity technique
the user's territory is implicitly
formed when they pick up objects in the
region
but the user could set the territory
size explicitly
thank you very much for your attention