Coordination of Human-Robot Teaming with Human Task Preferences.

Abstract

Advanced robotic technology is opening up the possibility of integrating robots into the human workspace to improve pro-ductivity and decrease the strain of repetitive, arduous phys-ical tasks currently performed by human workers. However, coordinating these teams is a challenging problem. We must understand how decision-making authority over scheduling decisions should be shared between team members and how the preferences of the team members should be included. We report the results of a human-subject experiment investigat-ing how a robotic teammate should best incorporate the pref-erences of human teammates into the team’s schedule. We find that humans would rather work with a robotic teammate that accounts for their preferences, but this desire might be mitigated if their preferences come at the expense of team efficiency.