CARE: Consistent Action-Response Execution for Human-Guided Robot Transport

Human-guided collaborative transport becomes interaction-critical when the operator can continue along a route segment that is not executable by the robot--payload system. In this regime, operator motion is not an exogenous reference: it simultaneously communicates a persistent route tendency and adapts to the robot's realized progress. A common modular formulation predicts one operator future from observation history, scores multiple robot proposals against that shared forecast, and then modifies the selected command for local feasibility. This can compare candidates under responses they would not induce and can condition prediction on an action that is never executed. We formulate local control over executable-action-indexed joint human--robot transitions and instantiate it in Consistent Action--Response Execution (CARE). Each nominal proposal or bounded alternative is first mapped to an executable action; that same action conditions the route-aligned operator-response prediction, the matched robot--operator rollout, and a fixed interaction utility for candidate selection. Bounded reciprocal refinement handles transient route--feasibility mismatch, whereas persistent progress loss replaces the nominal proposal with a progress-oriented recovery proposal while retaining the same downstream executable-action-conditioned evaluation. Across training and held-out maps, CARE preserves near-saturated performance when the indicated route remains locally usable and achieves the highest observed success and service availability when the operator can continue but the robot must detour. It also yields lower jerk-proxy values and measured controller latency than dynamic-window and Timed Elastic Band baselines. Factorial ablations distinguish reciprocal refinement from progress recovery, delayed-response tests probe temporal mismatch, and an indoor deployment demonstrates physical executability.