Spatial understanding as a common basis for human-robot collaboration

Abstract

We are developing a robotic cognitive architecture to be embedded in autonomous robots that can safely interact and collaborate with people on a wide range of physical tasks. Achieving true autonomy requires increasing the robot’s understanding of the dynamics of its world (physical understanding), and particularly the actions of people (cognitive understanding). Our system’s cognitive understanding arises from the Soar cognitive architecture, which constitutes the reasoning and planning component. The system’s physical understanding stems from its central representation, which is a 3D virtual world that the architecture synchronizes with the environment in real time. The virtual world provides a common representation between the robot and humans, thus improving trust between them and promoting effective collaboration.