A Reactive Assistive Role Switching For Interaction Management in Cooperative Tasks

This paper deals with solving robot cooperative task conflict using robot assistive behavior processing. These conflicts could occur in reactive multi mobile robot task. To manage such conflicts, each robot must assist the other units from their own capacities. A role method based on capacity adjustment is proposed. A role is a specific robot assistive behavior. Conflicts are then compensated by role switching. The same processing can be used in man-robot interaction. In this case, the robot has to define the efficient role in order to assist the man. A specific multi mobile robot conflict problem is studied: a constraint case of a reactive handling task with two mobile robots. This is a critical task since the object transported is only held by robot compression. Any degraded case, hardware failure or tactical conflict occurrences, would lead to a task deadlock. To define the global assistive role, on-line fuzzy reinforcement is used to adjust basic behaviors. In the studied case, no explicit communication is used to define the relationship between the robots in order to be generalized to man-machine cooperation. Our goal is to develop a strategy to manage interaction with handicapped persons. We studied a robotic rollator. In this case, the assistive role of rollator has to be adjusted in order to compensate the man´s task