Industrial robots excel at performing precise, accurate, fast, and repetitive tasks. This makes them ideal for activities like car assembly. One major drawback of these robots is that humans are unable to easily predict their motions, which forces most industrial robots to be isolated from human workers and restricts human-robot collaboration. This is especially true in a fluid working environment without rigidly-defined tasks, or where robots have autonomy. Although the intended robot motion is defined ahead of time through motion planning, efficiently conveying the intended motion to a human is difficult. Human-robot collaboration requires robots to communicate to humans in ways that are intuitive and efficient; yet, the motion intention inference problem leads to many safety and efficiency issues for humans working around robots.
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