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Scientific
report Human-machine interaction is increasingly important in domains
where artificial systems are expected to take up tasks, take initiatives, make
decisions, and coexist and collaborate with people. This implies a need to
understand the consequences of the interaction (cooperation, competition,
coordination) between people and robots or agents. The aim of HART (Workshop on
Human-Agent-Robot Teamwork) was to create a roadmap of the relevant research
questions and topics for the coming two, five and ten years. The workshop
brought together an excellent mix of senior researchers and young PhD students.
The lectures provided by the senior researchers were an immense bonus for the
young PhD students to help them understand more about the underlying problems
and the state of the art in Human-Agent-Robot Teamwork. The talks by the PhD
students gave them the opportunity to discuss their research plans and ideas
with the more experienced researchers. The feedback they received will have a
clear impact on the focus of their research and the approach they will follow
in their projects. During the workshop a number of topics attracted most attention:
understanding between team members, the notion of teamwork in relation to task
dependencies, and interdependencies of team members, and the purpose of HART.
Based on these discussions, a number of questions and issues were raised that will
help focus future research on topics related to HART. The plan is to refine our
understanding of these questions and issues in the coming months and to try and
publish that overview, and perhaps also additional articles summarizing aspects
of the state-of-the-art, in a high profile journal that is relevant for HART. The remainder of this report contains a short summary of some of
the notions put forward. From Answer.com we used the running definition:
“teamwork is the actions of individuals, brought together for a common purpose
or goals, which subordinates the needs of the individual to the needs of the
group. … The interactions among the
members and the work they complete together is the
teamwork.” The debate over the week repeatedly came to the questions: what
makes HART different from pure human teamwork? What is teamwork, and what is
essential for teamwork? How can we model that? How do we program agents and
robots capable of flexible teamwork? What do humans expect from HART? Is there
a unified theory of teamwork? Is all teamwork the same? These broad questions where further refined through small and
large group discussion. For example, what is the role of the agent in HART? Should
it be an intermediary between human and robot? The different teamwork phases
should be modeled and implemented in order to harmonize goals and team members:
initiation (recognition of the need for others to get the work done), team
formation and role adoption, doing the work and team maintenance, and
abandoning team activity (recognition of end-resolution). What is the effect of
the timing of teamwork (synchronous, asynchronous, ad-hoc)? How do we model and
implement pre-organized vs. self-organized teamwork? What is the difference
between coordination, cooperation, collaboration and teamwork? To what extent
does the team need common ground / shared understanding / shared mental models?
What are the roles of context and environment? How should we model and how
should team members deal with the difference between individual goals (for the
individual or for the team) and team goals (for individual team members or for
the team as a whole)? Catholijn Jonker, Jeff Bradshaw, Virginia Dignum [Back] |
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