Mixed initiative controller for simultaneous intervention, a model predictive control formulation

In this paper, we discussed the simultaneous intervention problem that arises from human-robot teams. The problem concerns with the case that one human operator has to intervene with several robots at almost the same time and it cannot be handled properly by existing methods. A model predictive control(MPC) based mixed initiative controller was proposed to solve this problem by embedding an intention model into the optimization problem. This method is in essence suitable for general MPC based mixed initiative controllers. The embedded intention model may cause the robot to deviate from its desired trajectory, for which conditions were developed to guarantee that the task completeness is not be affected. A comparison experiment was conducted and results showed that the proposed controller is more efficient and helpful in shortening the intervention time and allowing more robots to be successfully intervened in a simultaneous intervention scenario.