Empowering Field Workers: A Cognitive Architecture for Human-Robot Collaboration

Beril Yalçinkaya, Micael Santos Couceiro, Salviano Pinto Soares, Antonio Valente

Keywords: Human-robot collaboration, decision making, cognitive architecture, joint task achievement, human behaviour understanding

TL;DR: This paper presents an earlier stage of development towards providing a proactive human-robot collaboration by proposing a conceptual architecture in challenging applications and its future direction.

Abstract: Field robots are adaptable and sensitive to dynamic, unstructured and, therefore, challenging environments, such as in agriculture, forestry and construction. These robots perform demanding tasks that require too much time, labour and, most of the time, that are even hazardous for humans. Although humans still outperform robots in these domains with the ability to have critical thinking, strategy, empathy and physical skills, there is plenty of room for humans to outperform themselves by collaborating with robots. This position paper aims to explore the concept of human-robot collaboration in field robotics, wherein human operators take advantage of a multi-robot system for physically unendurable tasks, and robots benefit from the shared control and assessment of humans in dynamic and unknown environments. This paper presents an earlier stage of development towards this ambitious goal by proposing a conceptual architecture for human-robot collaboration in challenging applications and its envisaged future direction.