  When robots entered our day-to-day life, the shared space surrounding humans
and robots is critical for effective Human-Robot collaboration. The design of
shared space should satisfy humans' preferences and robots' efficiency. This
work uses kitchen design as an example to illustrate the importance of good
space design in facilitating such collaboration. Given the kitchen boundary,
counters, and recipes, the proposed method computes the optimal placement of
counters that meet the requirement of kitchen design rules and improve
Human-Robot collaboration. The key technical challenge is that the optimization
method usually evaluates thousands of designs and the computational cost of
motion planning, which is part of the evaluation function, is expensive. We use
a decentralized motion planner that can solve multi-agent motion planning
efficiently. Our results indicate that optimized kitchen designs can provide
noticeable performance improvement to Human-Robot collaboration.
