Cognitive task analysis: a proposal to model reactive behaviours

Abstract

A tentative analysis and design of behaviours to be implemented in robots has been developed. For that purpose we have analysed the human behaviour of the person who executes the robot task. Afterwards we have transferred this analysis to the robot in charge of the same task. The cognitive task analysis, a powerful tool coming from cognitive psychology, has been used to study the behaviour granularity of the robots. This analysis is of paramount importance because the implementation of more sophisticated robot behaviours depends on the appropriate selection of the basic robot behaviours. The paper introduces a brief explanation of different types of robot architectures, and our motivation, to give, later on, some ideas concerning the cognitive task analysis and the used methods; finally, as an example, the behaviour of a postman is modelled by using those tools to get the necessary behaviours for a robot in charge of that task.