Initiative in Robot Assistance during Collaborative Task Execution

Abstract

Collaborative robots are quickly gaining momentum in real-world settings. This has motivated many new research questions in human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we address the questions of whether and when a robot should take initiative during joint human-robot task execution. We develop a system capable of autonomously tracking and performing table-top object manipulation tasks with humans and we implement three different initiative models to trigger robot actions. Human initiated help gives control of robot action timing to the user; robot-initiated reactive help triggers robot assistance when it detects that the user needs help; and robot-initiated proactive help makes the robot help whenever it can. We performed a user study (N=18) to compare these trigger mechanisms in terms of task performance, usage characteristics, and subjective preference. We found that people collaborate best with a proactive robot, yielding better team fluency and high subjective ratings. However, they prefer having control of when the robot should help, rather than working with a reactive robot that only helps when it is needed.

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{baraglia2016hri,
  title = {Initiative in Robot Assistance during Collaborative Task Execution},
  author = {Baraglia, Jimmy and Cakmak, Maya and Nagai, Yukie and Rao, Rajesh P.N. and Asada, Minoru},
  year = {2016},
  month = mar,
  booktitle = {ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)},
  pages = {67--74},
  doi = {10.1109/HRI.2016.7451735},
  isbn = {978-1-4673-8370-7},
  issn = {2167-2148},
  type = {conference}
}