Representation and execution of social plans through human-robot collaboration

Abstract

In this paper, we define the concept of social plans combining two main ideas: the definition of social behaviors for enabling a robot to live with humans and the establishment of a symbiotic relationship among robots and humans to overcome robots’ limitations. Social plans are plans containing both robot and human actions and we provide an execution model for them where human actions are replaced by a human-robot collaboration scheme in which the robot actively drives the interaction with a human in order to obtain the desired effect. A fully implemented system has been realized following this idea and different examples are provided in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. The use of robots in people daily life and, accordingly, the requirement for a robot to behave in a socially acceptable way are getting more and more attention. However, although many progresses have been done in the last years, robots still have many limitations when they are required to share the environment with humans.