A survey of multi-agent Human–Robot Interaction systems

Abstract

This article presents a survey of literature in the area of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), specifically on systems containing more than two agents (i.e., having multiple humans and/or multiple robots). We identify three core aspects of “Multi-agent” HRI systems that are useful for understanding how these systems differ from dyadic systems and from one another. These are the Team structure, Interaction style among agents, and the system’s Computational characteristics. Under these core aspects, we present five attributes of HRI systems, namely Team size, Team composition, Interaction model, Communication modalities, and Robot control. These attributes are used to characterize and distinguish one system from another. We populate resulting categories with examples from the recent literature along with a brief discussion of their applications. We also analyze how these attributes in multi-agent systems differ from the case of dyadic human–robot systems. Through this survey, we summarize key observations from the current literature, and identify challenges and promising areas for future research in this domain. In order to realize the vision of robots being part of the society and interacting seamlessly with humans, there is a need to expand research on multi-human–multi-robot systems. Not only do these systems require coordination among several agents, they also involve multi-agent and indirect interactions which are absent from dyadic HRI systems. Including multiple agents in HRI systems requires more advanced interaction schemes, behavior understanding and control methods to allow natural interactions among humans and robots. In addition, research on human behavioral understanding in mixed human–robot teams also requires more attention. This will help formulate and implement effective robot control policies in HRI systems with large numbers of heterogeneous robots and humans; a team composition reflecting many real-world scenarios.