Can robots make good teammates?

Abstract

In every hospital labor and delivery department, a resource nurse decides which patients go to which room, which nurses care for which patients, and much more. “It’s a lot to keep in your head,” says Kristen Jerrier, a resource nurse in the labor and delivery department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Julie Shah of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is developing robot teammates for a range of workplace settings, from a robotic arm that could deliver parts on a factory floor to this decision-support robot that could help resource nurses decide which rooms and nurses to assign to patients. Image courtesy of Matthew Gombolay (photographer). “Her job is actually more computationally complex than that of an air traffic controller,” adds Julie Shah, who directs the Interactive Robotics Group in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Shah is developing a decision-support system embodied in a small desktop robot that can help Jerrier and other nurses make easy decisions, freeing up their attention for more difficult or complex decisions. Jerrier was skeptical that a robot could offer real value. But then it made suggestions similar to ones she herself would make. That’s when she thought “this could actually be helpful to me.” A growing group of human–robot interaction researchers is developing robot teammates for humans working in a range of jobs, from manufacturing cars to exploring outer space. Rather than being remotely controlled, these robotic teammates, whether machines with robotic arms or human-like forms, are designed to collaborate with humans directly. But being a good teammate is hard. “We need to know what our partner is thinking, anticipate what they will do next, and make fast adjustments when things don’t go according to plan,” explains Shah. Teammates also must learn from one another, …