Julie
Shah, Cynthia Breazeal
Human
Factors, The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, April 2010
Summary
Robots working in
team with humans are increasing and the field of application is also covering
stressed, highly uncertain, ambiguous and time pressured environments,
therefore studies on team-working and human-robot cooperation are of deep
interest. The approach in this paper is studying
human-human interaction in order to apply the discovered rules in the design of
a human-robot cooperation environment.
Studies on implicit and explicit
communication affecting team working have been done, in fact it is demonstrated
that implicit communication, including non-verbal cues improve team working in
terms of efficiency. It also has been studied that team under pressure,
uncertainty and complicated conditions can perform in the same way, if not even
better, than teams not facing this kind of conditions.
There are already a certain number of
HRI researches investigating robot capturing humans expression, gesture, there
are systems capable also of processing human spoken orders and Fong et al.
(2006) provided also the Human-Robot Interaction Operating System, which
accomplished cooperation through a central task manager capable of decompose
goals into high-level task assigns tasks either to a robot or a human.
Examples of implicit
communication, which are used for improving team performances, are the use of
periodic situation assessments, preplanning and dynamically redistributing
workload among the team.
In implicit coordination the
use of Shared Mental Models (SMM) is the main strategy working in the
background, for example “cross-trained” team member share responsibilities and
aspects which are capable of making the overall team more performing (Volpe,
1996), people tend through SMM to incorporate resources and capabilities of
other team members into their own action planning. Stout et al. (1996) has
identified 9 methods for enhancing SMM: 1) creating an open environment, 2)
setting goals and awareness, 3) exchanging preferences and expectations,
4)clarifying roles and information to be created, 5) clarifying sequencing and
timing, 6) discussing handling of unexpected events, 7) discussing how high
workload affects performance, 8)pre-preparing information and 9)
self-correcting. Stoud et al. (1999) and Orasanu (1990) found out that the most
effective team tend to generate more type of planning behaviours.
The authors of the paper
discuss the importance of “switching cost”, being an explanation for the
benefits of implicit communication, meaning that the immediate response of a
team member (caused by explicit communication) would cause degrade in team’s
performance since a responding to the command may imply a waste of time in
changing activity and this tends to be magnified in complex environments,
provoking lack of flexibility and therefore efficiency.
Three hypothesis are taken:
0) team exhibit increased use of implicit coordination behaviour as time
pressure increases, and coordination behaviour is positively correlated with
improved team performance outcomes, 1) explicit communication will provoke
immediate response, 2) explicit communication has higher specificity.
The experiment involve 30
couples, half of them working in a competition and time pressured environment;
the task was regarding building 4 structures with toy bricks and, although the
users could perform the 4 task simultaneously, not all the pieces for doing so
where given, without letting them know.
Key Concepts
Human-Robot Cooperation, Team Working
Key Results
Hypothesis all were proven
to be true. This study appears to be useful for robotics designers and suggests
that robots should use explicit cues for an action that required immediate response,
while efficient coordination should be promoted through implicit cues. If these
principles are followed, communication will be more natural.
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