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Cooperative Human–Robot Planning with Team Reasoning

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Abstract

The paper studies the connections between philosophical action theory and planning methods in artificial intelligence. It proposes a method of cooperative planning in which agents select actions using a combination of planning and team reasoning. Whereas several standard approaches to multi-agent planning start from individuals’ plans and try to combine them into a group plan, the proposed method starts from constructing a group plan from which the individuals derive their sub-plans. The former method is labelled I-mode planning and the latter we-mode planning. The basic idea of the proposed we-mode planning method is that the agents conceive themselves as a group agent that selects the best plan specifying the actions of all individual agents who then carry out their parts in the group plan. We-mode planning is suited for human–robot cooperation in situations in which the participants have a shared goal and a shared plan evaluation function, and can observe each others’ actions. The method is expected to lead in some cases to more human-like robot behaviour and more efficient execution of joint actions in human–robot teams.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the Velux Foundation and the Academy of Finland. I thank S.M. Amadae, Pekka Mäkelä and three anonymous referees whose comments and suggestions significantly improved the quality of the paper. I also thank the PENSOR group in Aarhus and the audiences at the 2nd Workshop Towards a Framework for Joint Action (in conjunction with HRI 2015, Portland, USA, March 2, 2015) and at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR, Kyoto, Japan, August 28, 2015) for useful questions and comments.

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  1. Raul Hakli

    Present address: Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Unioninkatu 40A, P. O. Box 24, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

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  1. Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Raul Hakli

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Hakli, R. Cooperative Human–Robot Planning with Team Reasoning. Int J of Soc Robotics 9, 643–658 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0377-4

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