Safe and Efficient Exploration of Human Models During Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract: Many collaborative human-robot tasks require the robot to stay safe and work efficiently around humans. Since the robot can only stay safe with respect to its own model of the human, we want the robot to learn a good model of the human in order to act both safely and efficiently. This paper studies methods that enable a robot to safely explore the space of a human-robot system to improve the robot's model of the human, which will consequently allow the robot to access a larger state space and better work with the human. In particular, we introduce active exploration under the framework of energy-function based safe control, investigate the effect of different active exploration strategies, and finally analyze the effect of safe active exploration on both analytical and neural network human models.