Users play an integral role in the performance of many robotic systems, and robotic systems must account for differences in users to improve collaborative performance. Much of the work in adapting to users has focused on designing teleoperation controllers that adjust to extrinsic user indicators such as force, or intent, but do not adjust to intrinsic user qualities. In contrast, the Human-Robot Interaction community has extensively studied intrinsic user qualities, but results may not rapidly be fed back into autonomy design. Here we provide foundational evidence for a new strategy that augments current shared control, and provide a mechanism to directly feed back results from the HRI community into autonomy design. Our evidence is based on a study examining the impact of the user quality “locus of control” on telepresence robot performance. Our results support our hypothesis that key user qualities can be inferred from human-robot interactions (such as through path deviation or time to completion) and that switching or adaptive autonomies might improve shared control performance.
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Situational Confidence Assistance for Lifelong Shared Autonomy
Shared autonomy enables robots to infer user intent and assist in accomplishing it. But when the user wants to do a new task that the robot does not know about, shared autonomy will hinder their performance by attempting to assist them with something that is not their intent. Our key idea is that the robot can detect when its repertoire of intents is insufficient to explain the user’s input, and give them back control. This then enables the robot to observe unhindered task execution, learn the new intent behind it, and add it to this repertoire. We demonstrate with both a case study and a user study that our proposed method maintains good performance when the human’s intent is in the robot’s repertoire, outperforms prior shared autonomy approaches when it isn’t, and successfully learns new skills, enabling efficient lifelong learning for confidence-based shared autonomy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734633
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10314367
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Robotics and Automation
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9561839
