AI Challenges in Human-Robot Cognitive Teaming
This work tackles the problem of improving human-robot teaming for the AI and robotics community, but it is incremental as it builds on existing efforts without presenting new experimental results.
The paper addresses the challenge of designing AI for robots to act as effective human teammates by emphasizing cognitive coordination over physical, proposing updates to intelligent agent architectures to include mental modeling of humans.
Among the many anticipated roles for robots in the future is that of being a human teammate. Aside from all the technological hurdles that have to be overcome with respect to hardware and control to make robots fit to work with humans, the added complication here is that humans have many conscious and subconscious expectations of their teammates - indeed, we argue that teaming is mostly a cognitive rather than physical coordination activity. This introduces new challenges for the AI and robotics community and requires fundamental changes to the traditional approach to the design of autonomy. With this in mind, we propose an update to the classical view of the intelligent agent architecture, highlighting the requirements for mental modeling of the human in the deliberative process of the autonomous agent. In this article, we outline briefly the recent efforts of ours, and others in the community, towards developing cognitive teammates along these guidelines.