Humans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot collaboration may be achieved by enabling robots to convey their intentions to human teammates via multiple communication channels. In this paper, we postulate that a better communication may take place should collaborative robots be able to anticipate their movements to human teammates in an intuitive way. In order to support such a claim, we propose a robot system's architecture through which robots can communicate planned motions to human teammates leveraging a Mixed Reality interface powered by modern head-mounted displays. Specifically, the robot's hologram, which is superimposed to the real robot in the human teammate's point of view, shows the robot's future movements, allowing the human to understand them in advance, and possibly react to them in an appropriate way. We conduct a preliminary user study to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed anticipatory visualization during a complex collaborative task. The experimental results suggest that an improved and more natural collaboration can be achieved by employing this anticipatory communication mode.
翻译:参与协作活动的人类自然能够通过多模式交流向团队伙伴传达其意图,这种交流由明确和隐含的暗示组成。同样,通过使机器人能够通过多个沟通渠道向人类团队伙伴传达其意图,可以实现更自然的人类机器人合作。在本文件中,我们假设,如果合作机器人能够以直觉的方式预测其向人类团队伙伴的移动,则可以进行更好的交流。为了支持这种主张,我们提议了机器人系统的结构,机器人可以通过这种结构向人类团队伙伴传达计划的行动,利用现代头顶显示的混合现实界面。具体地说,机器人的全息图是人类团队中真正的机器人的超身,它展示了机器人的未来运动,使人类能够提前了解它们,并可能以适当的方式对其作出反应。我们进行了初步用户研究,以评价在复杂的协作任务中拟议的防控视效果。实验结果表明,可以通过这一反合作实现改进和更自然的合作模式。