Human-Robot Collaborative Assembly Planning using Hybrid Conditional Planning

Abstract

For assembly planning, robots necessitate certain cognitive skills: high-level planning of actuation actions is needed to decide for the order of actuation actions, while geometric reasoning is needed to check the feasibility of these actions. For collaborative assembly tasks with humans, robots require further cognitive capabilities, such as commonsense reasoning, sensing, and communication skills, not only to cope with the uncertainty caused by incomplete knowledge about the humans’ behaviors but also to ensure safe collaborations. We introduce a novel formal framework for collaborative assembly planning that utilizes hybrid conditional planning extended with commonsense reasoning and a rich set of communication actions for collaborative tasks. We evaluate this method by a set of experiments in a furniture assembly domain.