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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A Collaborative Building Task in VR vs. Reality
Human-robot interaction is a critical area of research, providing support for collaborative tasks where a human instructs a robot to interact with and manipulate objects in an environment. However, an under-explored element of these collaborative manipulation tasks are small-scale building exercises, in which the human and robot are working together in close proximity with the same set of objects. Under these conditions, it is essential to ensure the human’s safety and mitigate comfort risks during the interaction. As there is danger in exposing humans to untested robots, a safe and controlled environment is required. Simulation and virtual reality (VR) for HRI have shown themselves to be suitable tools for creating space for human-robot experimentation that can be beneficial in these scenarios. However, the use of simulation and VR comes with the possibility of failures resulting from the sim-to-real gap, where the behavior of the simulated robot may not accurately reflect the experience of a human collaborator in a real-world setting. This gap can limit the generalizability of research findings and raise questions about the validity of using simulation and VR for HRI research. Our goal in this work is to demonstrate the effectiveness of sim-to-real approaches for contact-based human-robot interaction.
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- PAR ID:
- 10511939
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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