Commitments in Human-Robot Interaction
This work addresses the challenge of improving human-robot interaction for joint task performance, but it is incremental as it builds on existing philosophical theories without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling robots to perform joint tasks with humans by examining philosophical approaches to commitments, which emphasize behavioral and cognitive aspects for monitoring and signaling in joint action, and presents a guiding robot use-case and framework for exploring necessary robot capacities.
An important tradition in philosophy holds that in order to successfully perform a joint action, the participants must be capable of establishing commitments on joint goals and shared plans. This suggests that social robotics should endow robots with similar competences for commitment management in order to achieve the objective of performing joint tasks in human-robot interactions. In this paper, we examine two philosophical approaches to commitments. These approaches, we argue, emphasize different behavioral and cognitive aspects of commitments that give roboticists a way to give meaning to monitoring and pro-active signaling in joint action with human partners. To show that, we present an example of use-case with guiding robots and we sketch a framework that can be used to explore the type of capacities and behaviors that a robot may need to manage commitments.