Metrics for Human-Robot Team Design: A Teamwork Perspective on Evaluation of Human-Robot Teams

Abstract

Metrics for human-robot teaming should extend to teams consisting of multiple human and robotic agents, and to teams working in complex, dynamic work domains. This work proposes that to comprehensively analyze and evaluate multi-human, multi-robot teams, traditional HRI metrics of performance, and efficiency must be expanded upon to incorporate metrics of teamwork. We develop five distinct metrics to capture both ecological and cognitive aspects of teamwork found to be important in human-automation interaction, inspired by research in the cognitive systems engineering (CSE) community. We demonstrate the application of these metrics in a spacecraft maintenance case study comparing multiple human-robot team architectures. The case study demonstrates that the teamwork metrics capture aspects of human-robot interaction (HRI) not apparent when using only traditional performance and efficiency metrics. The article concludes that the proposed teamwork metrics are complementary to existing metrics in HRI and should be included in the evaluation of human-robot teams.