Robot Action Planning in the Presence of Careless Humans

This article introduces the notion of carelessness level into robot action planners such that the safety and efficiency are optimized. The core idea is to make the robot's plan less sensitive to the behavior of careless humans who may inattentively violate safety constraints and degrade efficiency. More precisely, our planner reduces the opportunities given to the careless humans to put themselves in danger and hamper the efficiency of the robot's plan. The effectiveness of the proposed planner is demonstrated through simulation studies on a packaging line and on a collaborative assembly line. Results show that the proposed scheme can improve efficiency and safety in both examples.