Human-Robot Collaboration : Bids and Bytes

Being able to establish successful human-robot teamwork in ambiguous, real life situations requires the ability for robots to dynamically engage in collaborative interactions whenever the need for collaboration arises. Understanding what distinguishes successful from less successful human-robot interaction patterns is therefore crucial for the future development of social robotic applications. This paper explores the social and task oriented dynamics occurring during collaboration with an autonomous robot and demonstrates that a crowd-sourced model can drive not only task completion but also social interactions successfully. We propose that bids and subtle cues signal interaction attempts which may play an important role in facilitating the establishment and sustenance of collaborative human robot interactions. We demonstrate the applicability of bids focused interaction perspective in three exploratory cases by modifying and applying a coding scheme that had originally been developed for the analysis of bids in marital interactions. Implications for further research and design of robots capable of teamwork are discussed.