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1. Human-in-the-loop: Role in Cyber Physical Agricultural Systems

   https://doi.org/10.15837/ijccc.2021.2.4166  

   Sreeram, Maitreya; Nof, Shimon Y. (April 2021, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTERS COMMUNICATIONS & CONTROL)

   null (Ed.)

   With increasing automation, the ‘human’ element in industrial systems is gradually being reduced, often for the sake of standardization. Complete automation, however, might not be optimal in complex, uncertain environments due to the dynamic and unstructured nature of interactions. Leveraging human perception and cognition can prove fruitful in making automated systems robust and sustainable. “Human-in-the-loop” (HITL) systems are systems which incorporate meaningful human interactions into the workflow. Agricultural Robotic Systems (ARS), developed for the timely detection and prevention of diseases in agricultural crops, are an example of cyber-physical systems where HITL augmentation can provide improved detection capabilities and system performance. Humans can apply their domain knowledge and diagnostic skills to fill in the knowledge gaps present in agricultural robotics and make them more resilient to variability. Owing to the multi-agent nature of ARS, HUB-CI, a collaborative platform for the optimization of interactions between agents is emulated to direct workflow logic. The challenge remains in designing and integrating human roles and tasks in the automated loop. This article explains the development of a HITL simulation for ARS, by first realistically modeling human agents, and exploring two different modes by which they can be integrated into the loop: Sequential, and Shared Integration. System performance metrics such as costs, number of tasks, and classification accuracy are measured and compared for different collaboration protocols. The results show the statistically significant advantages of HUB-CI protocols over the traditional protocols for each integration, while also discussing the competitive factors of both integration modes. Strengthening human modeling and expanding the range of human activities within the loop can help improve the practicality and accuracy of the simulation in replicating a HITL-ARS. 

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2. Blockchain-Based Mechanism for Robotic Cooperation Through Incentives: Prototype Application in Warehouse Automation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain53845.2021.00090  

   Grey, Jonathan; Seneviratne, Oshani; Godage, Isuru (December 2021, IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain))

   The use of blockchain in cyber-physical systems, such as robotics, is an area with immense potential to address many shortcomings in robotic coordination and control. In traditional swarm robotic applications, where homogeneous robots are utilized, it is possible to replace a robot if it malfunctions, and it can be assumed that all robots are interchangeable. However, in many real-world applications spanning from search and rescue missions to future household robotic appliances, heterogeneous robots will need to work together with the other robots and human agents to achieve specific tasks. Nevertheless, no such system exists. Therefore, we propose a system that utilizes a token economy for robotic agents that makes agents responsive to token acquisition as an incentive for collaboration in achieving a given task. The economy enables the system to self-govern, even under Byzantine and adversarial settings. We further incorporate a novel subcontracting framework within a blockchain environment to allow the robotic agents to efficiently and cost-effectively perform complex jobs requiring multiple agents with various capabilities. We conducted a thorough evaluation of the system in a prototype warehouse application scenario, and the results are promising. 

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3. Managing Collaborative Tasks within Heterogeneous Robotic Swarms using Swarm Contracts

   https://doi.org/10.1109/DAPPS55202.2022.00014  

   Mallikarachchi, Sanjaya; Dai, Can; Seneviratne, Oshani; Godage, Isuru (August 2022, IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (DAPPS))

   The growing number of applications in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) involving different types of robots while maintaining interoperability and trust is an ongoing challenge faced by traditional centralized systems. This paper presents what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first integration of the Robotic Operating System (ROS) with the Ethereum blockchain using physical robots. We implement a specialized smart contract framework called “Swarm Contracts” that rely on blockchain technology in real-world applications for robotic agents with human interaction to perform collaborative tasks while ensuring trust by motivating the agents with incentives using a token economy with a self-governing structure. The use of open-source technologies, including robot hardware platforms such as TurtleBot3, Universal Robot arm, and ROS, enables the ability to connect a wide range of robot types to the framework we propose. Going beyond simulations, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed system in real-world conditions with actual hardware robots. 

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4. Authr: A Task Authoring Environment for Human-Robot Teams

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3379337.3415872  

   Schoen, Andrew; Henrichs, Curt; Strohkirch, Mathias; Mutlu, Bilge (October 2020, UIST '20: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology)

   Collaborative robots promise to transform work across many industries and promote “human-robot teaming” as a novel paradigm. However, realizing this promise requires the understanding of how existing tasks, developed for and performed by humans, can be effectively translated into tasks that robots can singularly or human-robot teams can collaboratively perform. In the interest of developing tools that facilitate this process we present Authr, an end-to-end task authoring environment that assists engineers at manufacturing facilities in translating existing manual tasks into plans applicable for human-robot teams and simulates these plans as they would be performed by the human and robot. We evaluated Authr with two user studies, which demonstrate the usability and effectiveness of Authr as an interface and the benefits of assistive task allocation methods for designing complex tasks for human-robot teams. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of software tools for authoring human-robot collaborative plans. 

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5. Help or Hindrance: Understanding the Impact of Robot Communication in Action Teams

   Tanjim, Tauhid; St_George, Jonathan; Ching, Kevin; Taylor, Angelique (August 2025, IEEE)

   The human-robot interaction (HRI) field has rec- ognized the importance of enabling robots to interact with teams. Human teams rely on effective communication for suc- cessful collaboration in time-sensitive environments. Robots can play a role in enhancing team coordination through real-time assistance. Despite significant progress in human-robot teaming research, there remains an essential gap in how robots can effectively communicate with action teams using multimodal interaction cues in time-sensitive environments. This study addresses this knowledge gap in an experimental in-lab study to investigate how multimodal robot communication in action teams affects workload and human perception of robots. We explore team collaboration in a medical training scenario where a robotic crash cart (RCC) provides verbal and non-verbal cues to help users remember to perform iterative tasks and search for supplies. Our findings show that verbal cues for object search tasks and visual cues for task reminders reduce team workload and increase perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness more effectively than a robot with no feedback. Our work contributes to multimodal interaction research in the HRI field, highlighting the need for more human-robot teaming research to understand best practices for integrating collaborative robots in time-sensitive environments such as in hospitals, search and rescue, and manufacturing applications. 

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