Synthesis of Shared Control Protocols with Provable Safety and Performance Guarantees
This work addresses safety and performance in human-robot collaboration, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing synthesis methods with scalability improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of synthesizing shared control protocols for robots by blending human and autonomy commands, ensuring safety and performance guarantees through temporal logic specifications. The approach uses nonlinear programming and addresses scalability, with feasibility and scalability assessed via experimental evaluation.
We formalize synthesis of shared control protocols with correctness guarantees for temporal logic specifications. More specifically, we introduce a modeling formalism in which both a human and an autonomy protocol can issue commands to a robot towards performing a certain task. These commands are blended into a joint input to the robot. The autonomy protocol is synthesized using an abstraction of possible human commands accounting for randomness in decisions caused by factors such as fatigue or incomprehensibility of the problem at hand. The synthesis is designed to ensure that the resulting robot behavior satisfies given safety and performance specifications, e.g., in temporal logic. Our solution is based on nonlinear programming and we address the inherent scalability issue by presenting alternative methods. We assess the feasibility and the scalability of the approach by an experimental evaluation.