Special issue on learning for human–robot collaboration

Excerpt

Once isolated behind safety fences, robots are now making their way into spaces shared with people: not only on manufacturing production lines, but also our houses, museums, or hospitals. In these spaces, collaboration between humans and robots becomes vital, but also raises new challenges for robotics algorithms. A collaborative robot must be able to assist humans in a large diversity of tasks, understand its collaborator’s intentions as well as communicate its own, predict human actions to adapt its behavior accordingly, and decide when it can lead the task or instead follow the user. All these aspects require the robot to adapt. It needs to execute different tasks, and rapidly adapt to the user’s actions and requirements. This adaptation requirement makes learning a crucial feature for collaborative robots. …