Towards Enabling a Robot to Effectively Assist People in Human-Occupied Environments

Over the last decade, we have seen an increasing demand for robotscapable of coexisting with people. Enabling robots to operatesafely and effectively alongside human partners withinunstructured environments poses interesting research challengesthat broadly span the field of artificial intelligence. This paperpreviews some of the challenges that we faced in developing arobot "envoy" that operates for extended periods of timethroughout an office-like environment, assisting human occupantswith everyday activities that include greeting and escortingguests as well as retrieving and delivering objects. We see threeskill areas as critical for the robot to effectively perform thesetasks. The first is shared situational awareness-the robot mustinterpret its environment through a world model that is sharedwith its human partners. Secondly, the robot should act in a safe,predictable manner and be capable of intuitive interaction withpeople, through such means as natural language speech. Thirdly,the robot, which we initially treat as a rookie, shouldefficiently utilize information provided by human partners,requesting assistance when necessary and learning from suchassistance to become more competent with time.