Planning with Resource Conflicts in Human-Robot Cohabitation

In order to be acceptable members of future human-robot ecosystems, it is necessary for autonomous agents to be respectful of the intentions of humans cohabiting a workspace and account for conflicts on shared resources in the environment. In this paper we build an integrated system that demonstrates how maintaining predictive models of its human colleagues can inform the planning process of the robotic agent. We propose an Integer Programming based planner as a general formulation of this flavor of “humanaware” planning and show how the proposed formulation can be used to produce different behaviors of the robotic agent, showcasing compromise, opportunism or negotiation. Finally, we investigate how the proposed approach scales with the different parameters involved, and provide empirical evaluations to illustrate the pros and cons associated with the proposed style of planning.