Time-informed task planning in multi-agent collaboration

Human-robot collaboration requires the two sides to coordinate their actions in order to better accomplish common goals. In such setups, the timing of actions may significantly affect collaborative performance. The present work proposes a new framework for planning multi-agent interaction that is based on the representation of tasks sharing a common starting and ending point, as petals in a composite daisy graph. Coordination is accomplished through temporal constraints linking the execution of tasks. The planner distributes tasks to the involved parties sequentially. In particular, by considering the properties of the available options at the given moment, the planner accomplishes locally optimal task assignments to agents. Optimality is supported by a fuzzy theoretic representation of time intervals which enables fusing temporal information with other quantitative HRI aspects, therefore accomplishing a ranking of the available options. The current work aims at a systematic experimental assessment of the proposed framework is pursued, verifying that it can successfully cope with a wide range of HRI scenarios. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.