Supporting Complex Robot Behaviors with Simple Interaction Tools
José David, David I., W Curtis, Alexander Douglas, D William · Human-Robot Interaction · 2007
Human-Robot Interaction 40behavior, there is very little confusion.In actuality, the joystick has proved for many applications to be a valuable and effective interaction metaphor.The problem is that it is only appropriate for more direct levels of human-robot interaction.As the level of robot initiative and autonomy increases, the underlying metaphor for interaction must also change, resulting in a need for new and, at times, more sophisticated theories of robot behavior.The goal should not be to simplify the actual robot behaviors -complex environments and tasks require appropriately complex behaviors.Instead, the goal should be to simplify the user's mental model of robot behavior.This chapter advocates that alongside new autonomous capabilities, the user must also be given interaction tools that communicate a mental model of the robot and the task, enabling the user to predict and understand robot behavior and initiative.The necessary "theory of robot behavior" should not be communicated by providing users with a developer's perspective of the system.Behavioral sciences research indicates that passing on system complexity to the user will increase stress and failure rates while decreasing task efficiency (Gertman et al., 2005).Quite to the contrary, a great deal of craft may be required to filter and fuse the system data, abstracting away from the complexity to support a higher-level, functional understanding.The hard question is how exactly to accomplish this in a principled fashion.This chapter considers various components of interaction complexity common in humanrobot interfaces.With results from several previous HRI experiments, the paper examines means employed to reduce this complexity.These include a) perceptual abstraction and data fusion, b) the development of a common visualization and tasking substrate, and c) the introduction of interaction tools that simplify the theory of robot behavior necessary for the operator to understand, trust and exploit robot behavior.The elements of operator trust are considered in detail with emphasis on how intelligently facilitating information exchange and human and robot initiative can build appropriate trust.New approaches to facilitating human-robot initiative are discussed within the context of several real-world task domains including: robotic event photographer, ground-air teaming for mine detection, and an indoor search and detection task.