TR2025-066

E-UHTP: An Extended Human-Aware Task Planner for Communication-Free Collaborative Assembly

    •  Giacomuzzo, G., Pegoraro, G., Terreran, M., Ghidoni, S., Carli, R., Romeres, D., "E-UHTP: An Extended Human-Aware Task Planner for Communication-Free Collaborative Assembly", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - Workshop on The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From innovation to implementation, May 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-066 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Giacomuzzo2025may,
      • author = {Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Pegoraro, Giulia and Terreran, Matteo and Ghidoni, Stefano and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
      • title = {{E-UHTP: An Extended Human-Aware Task Planner for Communication-Free Collaborative Assembly}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - Workshop on The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From innovation to implementation},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = may,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-066}
      • }
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  • Research Area:

    Robotics

Abstract:

We propose E-UHTP, an enhanced task planner for collaborative assembly in communication-free human-robot environments. E-UHTP extends User-aware Hierarchical Task Planning (UHTP) by supporting joint actions, failure recovery, and online replanning. We introduce an automatic Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) generation method from annotated video demonstrations. Experimental simulations in multiple assembly scenarios demonstrate the improved performance, flexibility, and robustness of E-UHTP over baseline planners.

 

  • Related News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL contributes to ICRA 2025
      Date: May 19, 2025 - May 23, 2025
      Where: IEEE ICRA
      MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Jianlin Guo; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Yuki Shirai; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
      Brief
      • MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, from May 19th to May 23rd.

        MERL was a Bronze sponsor of the conference, and MERL researchers chaired four sessions in the areas of Manipulation Planning, Human-Robot Collaboration, Diffusion Policy, and Learning for Robot Control.

        MERL researchers presented four papers in the main conference on the topics of contact-implicit trajectory optimization, proactive robotic assistance in human-robot collaboration, diffusion policy with human preferences, and dynamic and model learning of robotic manipulators. In addition, five more papers were presented in the workshops: “Structured Learning for Efficient, Reliable, and Transparent Robots,” “Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Long-term Human Motion Prediction,” and “The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From Innovation to Implementation.”

        MERL researcher Diego Romeres delivered an invited talk titled “Dexterous Robotics: From Multimodal Sensing to Real-World Physical Interactions.”

        MERL also collaborated with the University of Padua on one of the conference’s challenges: the “3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym” (https://ai-olympics.dfki-bremen.de).

        During the conference, MERL researchers received the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best New Application Paper Award for their paper titled “Smart Actuation for End-Edge Industrial Control Systems.”

        About ICRA

        The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on research advances and the latest technological developments in robotics. The event attracts over 7,000 participants, 143 partners and exhibitors, and receives more than 4,000 paper submissions.
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