Coordinating Communication in Human-Robot Task Collaborations

In this paper we study how coordinating communication during human-robot task collaboration can be used to improve in situ decision-making and team performance. The problem of generating communication actions is formulated as a planning problem compatible with a class of pair-wise loosely-coupled tasks and uses the notion of role assignment to guide the robot's communication actions. We developed an approach for planning three different types of verbal feedback using a Markov decision process representation of the task environment and a set of policies for representing agent roles. We conducted a pilot experiment that compared human-human and human-robot collaborative task performance. A study designed to experimentally validate the approach is currently being conducted with n=20 users to determine if the generated communication can quantitatively improve team performance and qualitatively improve user experience. Keywordshuman-robot collaboration; communication; human-robot teamwork;