Planning with Verbal Communication for Human-Robot Collaboration
This addresses the challenge of improving human-robot collaboration in team settings, representing an incremental advance in integrating verbal communication into robotic planning.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling robots to coordinate with humans through verbal communication, proposing a formalism for robots to decide between performing tasks and issuing utterances, and finds that verbal commands are most effective for communicating objectives while maintaining user trust.
Human collaborators coordinate effectively their actions through both verbal and non-verbal communication. We believe that the the same should hold for human-robot teams. We propose a formalism that enables a robot to decide optimally between doing a task and issuing an utterance. We focus on two types of utterances: verbal commands, where the robot expresses how it wants its human teammate to behave, and state-conveying actions, where the robot explains why it is behaving this way. Human subject experiments show that enabling the robot to issue verbal commands is the most effective form of communicating objectives, while retaining user trust in the robot. Communicating why information should be done judiciously, since many participants questioned the truthfulness of the robot statements.