The overall aim of of the planned research is to develop a holistic, human-centric shared-control framework for human-robot collaboration that will consider the interaction on: (i) the cognitive/decision-making level for a dynamic allocation of responsibilities and roles to the human and the robot, as well as an online negotiation to avoid/resolve conflicts, and (ii) the physical/operational level with human-in-the-loop. Currently, there exists no holistic shared-control framework that enables interaction on cognitive (decision-making) and operational (physical) levels simultaneously, that is independent of the type of a robot system or the interaction (teleoperation or direct physical interaction).

The shared-control framework that will be developed within this project will enable human-robot collaboration in many application domains ranging from industrial, service, medical, to exploration of dangerous/inaccessible environments. In particular, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed a pressing need for robot assistants in hospitals because of a shortage of clinical professionals and the risk of infection spreading to hospital staff who interact with infected patients. Therefore, the focus of this action is on human-robot collaboration in healthcare.

image info This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (2014-2020) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Grant Agreement No. 101025273 - HRI-CoDeOp.

Timeline

[30-11-2022] End of the EU MSCA project.

[27-10-2022] Gave a talk on “Human-Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges for Real World Applications” at IROS22. The talk is available on Youtube.

[13-07-2022] Organized lab tour to high-school students at Stanford University Computer Science Department.

[09-11-2021] Start of the EU MSCA project at Stanford University.