Coactive Design is a new approach to address the increasingly sophisticated roles that people and robots play as the use of robots expands into new, complex domains. The approach is motivated by the desire for robots to perform less like teleoperated tools or independent automatons and more like interdependent teammates. In this article, we describe what it means to be interdependent, why this is important, and the design implications that follow from this perspective. We argue for a human-robot system model that supports interdependence through careful attention to requirements for observability, predictability, and directability. We present a Coactive Design method and show how it can be a useful approach for developers trying to understand how to translate high-level teamwork concepts into reusable control algorithms, interface elements, and behaviors that enable robots to fulfill their envisioned role as teammates. As an example of the coactive design approach, we present our results from the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge, a competition designed to spur development of advanced robots that can assist humans in recovering from natural and man-made disasters. Twenty-six teams from eight countries competed in three different tasks providing an excellent evaluation of the relative effectiveness of different approaches to human-machine system design.

Teamwork has become a widely accepted metaphor for describing the nature of multi-robot and multi-agent cooperation. By virtue of teamwork models, team members attempt to manage general responsibilities and commitments to each other in a coherent fashion that both enhances performance and facilitates recovery when unanticipated problems arise. Whereas early research on teamwork focused mainly on interaction within groups of autonomous agents or robots, there is a growing interest in leveraging human participation effectively. Unlike autonomous systems designed primarily to take humans out of the loop, many important applications require people, agents, and robots to work together in close and relatively continuous interaction. For software agents and robots to participate in teamwork alongside people in carrying out complex real-world tasks, they must have some of the capabilities that enable natural and effective teamwork among groups of people. Just as important, developers of such systems need tools and methodologies to assure that such systems will work together reliably and safely, even when they have been designed independently.

This tutorial provides a synopsis of key findings and theoretical advances from cognitive science and socio-cognitive theory, with examples of how the results of this research can be applied to the design of human-robotic systems. Topics covered will run the gamut from basic cognitive science (e.g., perception, attention, learning and memory, information processing, multi-tasking, conscious awareness, individual differences) to socio-cognitive issues (e.g., theories of social interaction, dynamic functional allocation, mixed-initiative interaction, human-agent-robot teamwork, coactive design, theory of organizations). Additionally, the tutorial will address new technologies that attempt to leverage the current state of theory (e.g., neuroergonomics, brain-machine interfaces, detection of cognitive states, robotic prostheses and orthotics, cognitive and sensory prostheses). Throughout the tutorial, the presenters will give descriptions and demonstrations of working systems that exemplify the principles being taught. Separately, the presenters have given highly-successful tutorials on relevant subjects at workshops and conferences such as CHI and HCI International, as well as in a variety of industrial and government settings. In this tutorial, they propose to bring together their experience to bear on issues of specific interest to the HRI community.

This paper introduces the concept of Coactivity as a new focal point for Human-Robot Interaction to address the more sophisticated roles of partner or teammate envisioned for future human-robot systems. We propose that most approaches to date have focused on autonomy and suggest that autonomy is the wrong focal point. The envisioned roles, if properly performed, have a high level of interdependence that cannot be addressed solely by autonomy and necessitate a focus on the coactivity.

Several key aspects of coordination such as teamwork, roles, and communication, are enabled and driven by, and even largely defined by, various systems of regulation. One key feature of all these elements in human coordination is their dynamic nature. We have developed a framework to provide a dynamic regulatory system for supporting coordination in human-robot teamwork. This framework supports the definition and functions of roles within teams, as well as the creation of subteams and the roles within them. It also serves to regulate communications in support of coordination. We have demonstrated our system with a team of two humans and five robots performing advanced coordination while trying to apprehend an intruder hiding on a cluttered pier. This work lays the foundation for human-robot coordination based on dynamic regulation.

Complex services in service-oriented architectures such as the grid typically require to be configured in multiple ways that cannot be anticipated by service designers; we illustrate this requirement by studying the myGrid registry, a grid registry capable of supporting annotations of service descriptions by third-party users. Instead, services have to be conceived so that they can be configured at deployment and run time. We argue that KAoS is a powerful and flexible language that can help define such configurations. Using our registry case study, we examine the requirements that the definition of such complex configurations brings on policy languages and explain how they can be satisfied. Specifically, we use role-value maps to express constraints between property values; we introduce a notion of PolicySet with associated parameters that support constraints within a well defined scope; finally, we define a notion of context that allows us to refer to property values that were extant in past execution environments. Essentially, these concepts allow us to add constraints to values in policy definitions, to organise policies in coherent and structure blocks, and to refer to the execution history. The paper discusses these concepts and how they are implemented in a binding of the KAoS policy language to the myGrid registry.

Agile computing may be defined as opportunistically (or on user demand) discovering and taking advantage of available resources in order to improve capability, performance, efficiency, fault tolerance, and survivability. The term agile is used to highlight both the need to quickly react to changes in the environment as well as the need to exploit transient resources only available for short periods of time. Agile computing builds on current research in grid computing, ad-hoc networking, and peer-to-peer resource sharing. This paper describes both the general notion of agile computing as well as one particular approach that exploits mobility of code, data, and computation. Some performance metrics are also suggested to measure the effectiveness of any approach to agile computing.

While You're Away (WYA) is a distributed system that aggregates the computational power of individual computer systems. WYA introduces the notion of roaming computations-Java-based programs that move around the network utilizing the resources of idle workstations. WYA provides architectural independence and addresses issues of convenience, security and incentive for owners of workstations. WYA is based on the NOMADS mobile agent system, which uses the Aroma Virtual Machine (VM) to provide strong mobility, resource control, and resource accounting. WYA currently runs on Win32 and UNIX workstations but is being extended to work on other computational devices such as television set-top boxes, video game consoles, and Internet appliances.

The Portable Satellite Assistant (PSA) is a softball-sized flying robot designed to operate autonomously onboard manned and unmanned spacecraft in pressurized micro-gravity environments. In this paper we provide an overview of some of the design challenges we face in making the PSA practical, effective, and usable for future space missions. In particular we highlight the need for an agent architecture supporting adjustable autonomy and a generic model of teamwork.

No abstract available.

Knowledge acquisition is a constructive modeling process, not simply a matter of “expertise transfer.” Consistent with this perspective, we advocate knowledge acquisition practices and tools that facilitate active collaboration between expert and knowledge engineer, that exploit a serviceable theory in their application, and that support knowledge-based system development from a life-cycle perspective. A constructivist theory of knowledge is offered as a plausible theoretical foundation for knowledge acquisition and as an effective practical approach to the dynamics of modeling. In this view, human experts construct knowledge from their own personal experiences while interacting with their social constituencies (e.g., supervisors, colleagues, clients patients) in their niche of expertise. Knowledge acquisition is presented as a cooperative enterprise in which the knowledge engineer and expert collaborate in constructing an explicit model of problem solving in a specific domain. From this perspective, the agenda for the knowledge acquisition research community includes developing tools and methods to aid experts in their efforts to express, elaborate, and improve their models of the domain. This functional view of expertise helps account for several problems that typically arise in practical knowledge acquisition projects, many of which stem directly from the inadequacies of representations used at various stages of system development. to counter these problems, we emphasize the use of mediating representations as a means of communication between expert and knowledge engineer, and intermediate representations to help bridge the gap between the mediating representations themselves, as well as between the mediating representations and a particular implementation formalism. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.