Designing Human-Robot Coexistence Space
This work addresses the need for safer and more efficient human-robot interactions in shared spaces like living rooms and offices, though it is incremental as it builds on existing motion planning techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of designing environments for human-robot coexistence by proposing a computational framework that optimizes room layouts to balance human preferences and robot navigation constraints, using an autonomous wheelchair as an example. It reduces design time from 10-20 minutes to 3-5 minutes on average and produces reasonable designs for tight spaces and varied user preferences.
When the human-robot interactions become ubiquitous, the environment surrounding these interactions will have significant impact on the safety and comfort of the human and the effectiveness and efficiency of the robot. Although most robots are designed to work in the spaces created for humans, many environments, such as living rooms and offices, can be and should be redesigned to enhance and improve human-robot collaboration and interactions. This work uses autonomous wheelchair as an example and investigates the computational design in the human-robot coexistence spaces. Given the room size and the objects $O$ in the room, the proposed framework computes the optimal layouts of $O$ that satisfy both human preferences and navigation constraints of the wheelchair. The key enabling technique is a motion planner that can efficiently evaluate hundreds of similar motion planning problems. Our implementation shows that the proposed framework can produce a design around three to five minutes on average comparing to 10 to 20 minutes without the proposed motion planner. Our results also show that the proposed method produces reasonable designs even for tight spaces and for users with different preferences.