Negotiation-based Human-Robot Collaboration via Augmented Reality

Effective human-robot collaboration (HRC) requires extensive communication among the human and robot teammates, because their actions can potentially produce conflicts, synergies, or both. In this paper, we develop an augmented reality-driven, negotiation-based (ARN) framework for HRC, where ARN supports planning-phase negotiations within human-robot teams through a novel AR-based interface. We have conducted experiments in an office environment, where multiple mobile robots work on delivery tasks. The robots could not complete the tasks on their own, but sometimes need help from their human teammate, rendering human-robot collaboration necessary. From the experimental results, we observe that ARN significantly reduced the human-robot team's task completion time in comparison to a non-AR baseline.