Gerard Canal, Guillem Alenyà and Carme Torras
Abstract: Healthcare robots will be the next big advance in humans' domestic welfare, with robots able to assist elderly people and users with disabilities. However, each user has his own preferences, needs and abilities. Therefore, robotic assistants will need to adapt to them, behaving accordingly. Towards this goal, we propose a method to perform task planning adaptation to the user preferences. A user model is built from the user's answers to simple questions with a Fuzzy Inference System, and it is then integrated into the planning domain. We describe an adaptation method based on both the user satisfaction and the execution outcome, depending on which penalizations are applied to the planner's rules. We demonstrate the application of the method in a simple shoe fitting scenario, and the results show quick behavior adaptation, even when the user behavior changes, as well as robustness to wrong inference of the initial user model.
The following video shows the shoe-fitting task and explains the adaptation of the behavior: