Skill Interaction Categories for Communication in Flexible Human-Robot Teams

Abstract

Flexible human-robot cooperation can be coordinated by dynamic task allocation, where team members observe task progress and repeatedly decide to execute outstanding operations from a commonly known task model. Such task-level coordination strategies do not cover cases, where a high level of abstraction for task modelling implies operations infeasible for one single agent due to limited capabilities. Task-level coordination can handle these operations by introducing additional operation-level coordination for more fine-grained interaction, e.g. to hand over a tool or provide a helping hand. We contribute an approach to classify operations regarding the interaction they require. Based on this classification, we show how robots can plan and issue communication to coordinate respective interaction within dynamic plan execution. Against the background of Smart Factories, a smartphone app is used as communication channel and evaluated in a user study.