HARMONIC: A Framework for Explanatory Cognitive Robots
This addresses the challenge of creating explanatory cognitive robots for human-robot collaboration, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing layering concepts without claiming major breakthroughs.
The authors tackled the problem of enabling general-purpose robots to become trusted teammates by developing HARMONIC, a framework that integrates cognitive and robot layers for complex decision-making and explanation, resulting in an initial implementation on simulated UGVs and drones for a search and retrieval task.
We present HARMONIC, a framework for implementing cognitive robots that transforms general-purpose robots into trusted teammates capable of complex decision-making, natural communication and human-level explanation. The framework supports interoperability between a strategic (cognitive) layer for high-level decision-making and a tactical (robot) layer for low-level control and execution. We describe the core features of the framework and our initial implementation, in which HARMONIC was deployed on a simulated UGV and drone involved in a multi-robot search and retrieval task.