Task-Learning Policies for Collaborative Task Solving in Human-Robot Interaction

The objective of this doctoral research is to design multimodal task-learning policies for a robotic system that targets the exchange of task rules between humans and robots. This objective is achieved through a collaborative task application during human-robot interaction where the two partners learn a task from each other and accomplish a shared goal. As a first step, a method to model human-action primitives using a pattern-recognition technique is presented. Next, algorithms are developed to generate turn-taking strategies in response to human task behaviors. The contribution of this work is in engaging robots with humans in collaborative play task by modeling statistical patterns of play behaviors and reusing previously learned knowledge to reduce the decision process. Here, results of previous work are presented, and remaining works including deploying a physically embodied agent and developing an evaluation platform are outlined.