Cooperation in human-robot-teams

Abstract

The concept of a human-robot-team is presented. Because of its high flexibility and adaptability, the human-robot cooperation is expected to have a wide range of applications in uncertain environments not only in future construction and manufacturing industries but also for services. A Multi-agent control architecture gives an appropriate frame for the flexibility of the human-robot-team. Robots are considered as intelligent autonomous assistants of humans, which can mutually interact on a symbolic level and a physical level. This interaction is achieved with the communication between human and robots, the interpretation of the transmitted information, the coordination of the activities and the cooperation between independent agents. Equipped with some sensing modalities for the perception of the environment, the two-arm Karlsruhe Autonomous Mobile Robot (KAMRO) is introduced to demonstrate the principles of the cooperation among human and robot agents. Finally, guidelines are given for future studies on human-robot-cooperation.