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Fluency---described as the ``coordinated meshing of joint activities between members of a well-synchronized team''---is essential to human-robot team success. Human teams achieve fluency through rich, often mostly implicit, communication. A key challenge in bridging the gap between industry and academia is understanding what influences human perception of a fluent team experience to better optimize human-robot fluency in industrial environments. This paper addresses this challenge by developing an online experiment featuring videos that vary the timing of human and robot actions to influence perceived team fluency. Our results support three broad conclusions. First, we did not see differences across most subjective fluency measures. Second, people report interactions as more fluent as teammates stay more active. Third, reducing delays when humans' tasks depend on robots increases perceived team fluency.
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Modeling Human Temporal Uncertainty in Human-Agent Teams
Automated scheduling is potentially a very useful tool for facilitating efficient, intuitive interactions between a robot and a human teammate. However, a current gap in automated scheduling is that it is not well understood how to best represent the timing uncertainty that human teammates introduce. This paper attempts to address this gap by designing an online human-robot collaborative packaging game that we use to build a model of human timing uncertainty from a population of crowdworkers. We conclude that heavy-tailed distributions are the best models of human temporal uncertainty, with a Log-Normal distribution achieving the best fit to our experimental data. We discuss how these results along with our collaborative online game will inform and facilitate future explorations into scheduling for improved human-robot fluency.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1651822
- PAR ID:
- 10220624
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AI-HRI Symposium at AAAI-FSS 2020
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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