Human-agent-robot teamwork

Abstract

Teamwork has become a widely accepted metaphor for describing the nature of multi-robot and multi-agent cooperation. By virtue of teamwork models, team members attempt to manage general responsibilities and commitments to each other in a coherent fashion that both enhances performance and facilitates recovery when unanticipated problems arise. Whereas early research on teamwork focused mainly on interaction within groups of autonomous agents or robots, there is a growing interest in leveraging human participation effectively. Unlike autonomous systems designed primarily to take humans out of the loop, many important applications require people, agents, and robots to work together in close and relatively continuous interaction. For software agents and robots to participate in teamwork alongside people in carrying out complex real-world tasks, they must have some of the capabilities that enable natural and effective teamwork among groups of people. Just as important, developers of such systems need tools and methodologies to assure that such systems will work together reliably and safely, even when they have been designed independently.