Planning with Verbal Communication for Human-Robot Collaboration
Abstract
Human collaborators coordinate effectively their actions through both verbal and non-verbal communication. We believe that the the same should hold for human-robot teams. We propose a formalism that enables a robot to decide optimally between taking a physical action toward task completion and issuing an utterance to the human teammate. We focus on two types of utterances: verbal commands, where the robot asks the human to take a physical action, and state-conveying actions, where the robot informs the human about its internal state, which captures the information that the robot uses in its decision making. Human subject experiments show that enabling the robot to issue verbal commands is the most effective form of communicating objectives, while retaining user trust in the robot. Communicating information about the robot’s state should be done judiciously, since many participants questioned the truthfulness of the robot statements when the robot did not provide sufficient explanation about its actions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Oct 31, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3203305
Entities
People
- Jodi Forlizzi
- Minae Kwon
- Siddhartha Srinivasa
- Stefanos Nikolaidis
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Istituto Superiore di SanitÃ
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Naval Research
- Stanford University
- University of Washington