A Hierarchical Architecture for Human-Robot Cooperation Processes

Abstract: In this paper we propose FlexHRC+, a hierarchical human-robot cooperation architecture designed to provide collaborative robots with an extended degree of autonomy when supporting human operators in high-variability shop-floor tasks. The architecture encompasses three levels, namely for perception, representation, and action. Building up on previous work, here we focus on (i) an in-the-loop decision making process for the operations of collaborative robots coping with the variability of actions carried out by human operators, and (ii) the representation level, integrating a hierarchical AND/OR graph whose online behaviour is formally specified using First Order Logic. The architecture is accompanied by experiments including collaborative furniture assembly and object positioning tasks.