Developing Effective Robot Teammates for Human-Robot Collaboration

Developing collaborative robots that can productively operate out of isolation and work safely in uninstrumented, human-populated environments is critically important for advancing the field of robotics. Especially in domains where modern robots are ineffective, we wish to leverage human-robot teaming to improve the efficiency, ability, and safety of human workers. Our work, outlined in this extended abstract, focuses on creating agents capable of human-robot teamwork by leveraging learning from demonstration, hierarchical task networks, multi-agent planning and state estimation, and intention recognition. We briefly describe our recent work within human-robot collaboration, including task comprehension, learning and performing assistive behaviors, and training novice human collaborators to become competent co-workers.