Safe Human-Interactive Control via Shielding
This work addresses safety for human-interactive robotics, which is crucial to prevent human injury, but it is incremental as it builds on existing shielding methods with a specific human behavior assumption.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring safety in human-interactive robotics by defining backup actions that humans might take to avoid accidents, and proposes an algorithm that overrides arbitrary controllers to guarantee safety under this assumption. It evaluates the approach in a simulated environment with real and simulated humans, showing it can prevent collisions without specifying concrete numbers.
Ensuring safety for human-interactive robotics is important due to the potential for human injury. The key challenge is defining safety in a way that accounts for the complex range of human behaviors without modeling the human as an unconstrained adversary. We propose a novel approach to ensuring safety in these settings. Our approach focuses on defining backup actions that we believe human always considers taking to avoid an accident -- e.g., brake to avoid rear-ending the other agent. Given such a definition, we consider a safety constraint that guarantees safety as long as the human takes the appropriate backup actions when necessary to ensure safety. Then, we propose an algorithm that overrides an arbitrary given controller as needed to ensure that the robot is safe. We evaluate our approach in a simulated environment, interacting with both real and simulated humans.