Negotiation-based Human-Robot Collaboration via Augmented Reality
This addresses collaboration inefficiencies in mixed human-robot teams, such as in delivery tasks, but appears incremental as it builds on existing AR and negotiation concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of communication gaps in human-robot collaboration by developing an augmented reality interface and a negotiation-based framework, resulting in significantly reduced task completion times for the team.
Effective human-robot collaboration (HRC) requires extensive communication among the human and robot teammates, because their actions can potentially produce conflicts, synergies, or both. We develop a novel augmented reality (AR) interface to bridge the communication gap between human and robot teammates. Building on our AR interface, we develop an AR-mediated, negotiation-based (ARN) framework for HRC. We have conducted experiments both in simulation and on real robots in an office environment, where multiple mobile robots work on delivery tasks. The robots could not complete the tasks on their own, but sometimes need help from their human teammate, rendering human-robot collaboration necessary. Results suggest that ARN significantly reduced the human-robot team's task completion time compared to a non-AR baseline approach.