HARMONIC: Cognitive and Control Collaboration in Human-Robotic Teams
This addresses the challenge of building mutual trust and coordination in human-robot teams, which is incremental as it combines existing cognitive and control methods for a specific application.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling effective human-robot teaming by developing HARMONIC, a cognitive-robotic architecture that integrates cognitive frameworks with robot control systems, resulting in robots that coordinate actions, adapt to scenarios, and engage in natural communication in simulation experiments.
This paper describes HARMONIC, a cognitive-robotic architecture that integrates the OntoAgent cognitive framework with general-purpose robot control systems applied to human-robot teaming (HRT). HARMONIC incorporates metacognition, meaningful natural language communication, and explainability capabilities required for developing mutual trust in HRT. Through simulation experiments involving a joint search task performed by a heterogeneous team of two HARMONIC-based robots and a human operator, we demonstrate heterogeneous robots that coordinate their actions, adapt to complex scenarios, and engage in natural human-robot communication. Evaluation results show that HARMONIC-based robots can reason about plans, goals, and team member attitudes while providing clear explanations for their decisions, which are essential requirements for realistic human-robot teaming.