Humans Prefer Collaborating with a Robot Who Leads in a Physical Human-Robot Collaboration Scenario

Abstract

A question that many researchers in the area of human-robot interaction are addressing is how to create more human-like behaviour in robots to make the collaboration between a human and a robot more intuitive to the human partner. In this paper, we propose a novel method for robot control that aims to more accurately replicate human behaviour in human-robot collaborative tasks by considering how leader-follower relationships are established during physical human collaboration. How the leader/follower roles are allocated in a human dyad was learnt during a study on human-human collaboration. The performance of the proposed control method was evaluated using a reaching scenario where we compared task performance between individual tasks, tasks where two people were collaborating and tasks where a human was collaborating with a robot using the proposed control model. In addition, we were interested in observing how the subjects perceived the difficulty of each task type. This was evaluated using the Nasa Task Load Index and a short questionnaire. The results of the evaluation showed, that the robot control method is capable of replicating human behaviour to benefit the overall task performance of the subject in collaboration. Furthermore, the results in this work showed that the majority of subjects preferred to perform the task in collaboration with a robot that leads them, compared to performing the task on their own or in collaboration either with another human or a follower robot.