Software Architecture to Generate Assistive Behaviors for Social Robots

To facilitate the design of socially assistive robots (SARs), we present an architecture to generate assistive behavior for social robots given a high-level description of the intent of the assistance. Our approach features an ontology of assistive intents, a hierarchical task network planner, and robot middleware. We demonstrate the behaviors on two robot platforms and compare the behaviors. While many of the behaviors are similar, challenges remain in generating behaviors that will be presented consistently across multiple platforms.