Building a Bridge with a Robot: A System for Collaborative On-table Task Execution

Abstract

It is possible to build highly accurate and mobile robots able to perceive their environment. Such robots can be used to assist humans in everyday tasks to reduce their workload. As a consequence, communication and interaction between humans and robots is becoming more important. In this paper we present a system for human-robot collaboration for on-table tasks. Due to its extensible design our system serves us as a base for further investigations in human-robot collaboration. We used the system to implement five action-selection strategies for the robot:proactive, autonomous, reactive, human-requested and human-commands. We conducted a pilot study to compare the interaction modes during a task in which the human and the robot build a bridge using blocks. The results of the pilot study indicate that for the simple bridge-building task, people prefer to interact with a robot using the proactive action-selection strategy. The completion of the pilot study indicates that the system is useful for human-robot collaboration studies. Several limitations have been identified that will be addressed in future developments.