Role-based coordinating communication for effective human-robot task collaborations

This short summary paper briefly describes a method for using the embodied social communication capabilities of a robot to achieve and enhance coordination in human-robot task collaboration scenarios. The approach focuses on planning coordinating social behaviors using the formalism of roles to allow a robot to produce and interpret communicative feedback expressing a desired allocation of duties and to issue positive or negative reinforcement to a person as the task progresses and in response to the inferred future activity of the collaborating partner.