Methods and systems for enabling human-machine collaborations include a generalizable framework that supports dynamic adaptation and reuse of robotic capability representations and human-machine collaborative behaviors. Specifically, a method of enabling user-robot collaboration includes providing a composition of a robot capability that models a robot's functionality for performing a type of task action and user interaction capabilities; specializing the robot capability with an information kernel to provide a specialized robot capability, the information kernel encapsulating a set of task-related parameters associated with the type of task action; providing an instance of the specialized robot capability as a robot capability element that controls the robot's functionality based on the set of task-related parameters; providing instances of the user interaction capabilities as interaction capability elements; executing the robot capability element to receive user input via the user interaction capability elements; and controlling, based on the user input and the set of task-related parameters, the robot's functionality to perform a task action of the type of task action in collaboration with the user input.