What Lies Ahead? Expectation Management in Human-Robot Collaboration

To Boldly Go Where No Human-Robot Team Has Gone Before

Volume

To Boldly Go Where No Human-Robot Team Has Gone Before

Contents

We aim to build robots that go beyond command-and-response and can engage in fluent collaborative behavior with their human counterparts. This paper discusses one aspect of collaboration fluency: expectation management -predicting what a human collaborator will do next and how to act on that prediction. We propose a formal time-based collaborative framework that can be used to evaluate this and other aspects of collocated human-robot teamwork, and show how expectation management can enable a higher level of fluency and improved efficiency in this framework. We also present an implementation of the proposed theoretical framework in a simulated human-robot collaborative task.