Abstract: Effective human-robot collaboration (HRC) requires extensive communication among the human and robot teammates, because their actions can potentially produce conflicts, synergies, or both. An augmented reality-driven, negotiation-based (ARN) framework is provided for HRC, where ARN supports planning-phase negotiations within human-robot teams. Experiments in an office environment, where multiple mobile robots work on delivery tasks, where the robots could not complete the tasks on their own, but sometimes need help from their human teammate, making human-robot collaboration necessary. In comparison to a non-AR baseline, ARN significantly improved the human users' work efficiency, and their cognitive load, while reducing the overall task completion time of the whole team.

Abstract: Effective human-robot collaboration (HRC) requires extensive communication among the human and robot teammates, because their actions can potentially produce conflicts, synergies, or both. An augmented reality-driven, negotiation-based (ARN) framework is provided for HRC, where ARN supports planning-phase negotiations within human-robot teams. Experiments in an office environment, where multiple mobile robots work on delivery tasks, where the robots could not complete the tasks on their own, but sometimes need help from their human teammate, making human-robot collaboration necessary. In comparison to a non-AR baseline, ARN significantly improved the human users' work efficiency, and their cognitive load, while reducing the overall task completion time of the whole team.