Human inspiration and comparison for monitoring strategies in a robotic convoy task

Abstract

Human-robot teamwork requires agents to pay attention to both surrounding environment and teammates. Bandwidth and computational limitations prevent an agent to continuously execute this monitoring activity. Inspired by the behavior of human beings, paying frequent attention to timers while approaching deadlines, we provide robots with general monitoring strategies based on attentional mechanisms, for filtering data and actively focusing only on relevant information. We consider a convoy task (led by a human or a robot) as a benchmark to evaluate and compare human and robot monitoring behaviors. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.