A Measure to Match Robot Plans to Human Intent: A Case Study in Multi-Objective Human-Robot Path-Planning*

Measuring how well a potential solution to a problem matches the problem-holder’s intent and detecting when a current solution no longer matches intent is important when designing resilient human-robot teams. This paper addresses intent-matching for a robot path-planning problem that includes multiple objectives and where human intent is represented as a vector in the multi-objective payoff space. The paper introduces a new metric called the intent threshold margin and shows that it can be used to rank paths by how close they match a specified intent. The rankings induced by the metric correlate with average human rankings (obtained in an MTurk study) of how closely different paths match a specified intent. The intuition of the intent threshold margin is that it represents how much the human’s intent must be "relaxed" to match the payoffs for a specified path.