When robots entered our day-to-day life, the shared space surrounding humans and robots is critical for effective Human-Robot collaboration. The design of shared space should satisfy humans' preferences and robots' efficiency. This work uses kitchen design as an example to illustrate the importance of good space design in facilitating such collaboration. Given the kitchen boundary, counters, and recipes, the proposed method computes the optimal placement of counters that meet the requirement of kitchen design rules and improve Human-Robot collaboration. The key technical challenge is that the optimization method usually evaluates thousands of designs and the computational cost of motion planning, which is part of the evaluation function, is expensive. We use a decentralized motion planner that can solve multi-agent motion planning efficiently. Our results indicate that optimized kitchen designs can provide noticeable performance improvement to Human-Robot collaboration.

翻译：当机器人进入我们的日常生活后，人与机器人共享的空间对于高效的人机协作至关重要。共享空间的设计应同时满足人类的偏好和机器人的效率需求。本研究以厨房设计为例，阐述了良好空间设计在促进这种人机协作中的重要性。给定厨房边界、台面和食谱，所提出的方法能够计算出台面的最优布局，使之既符合厨房设计规则的要求，又能改善人机协作。其中的关键技术难点在于，优化方法通常需要评估数千种设计方案，而运动规划（作为评价函数的一部分）的计算成本非常高昂。我们采用了一种分布式运动规划器，能够高效解决多智能体运动规划问题。研究结果表明，优化后的厨房设计能显著提升人机协作的性能表现。