A knowledge-based component for human-robot teamwork

Teams of humans and robots pose a new challenge to teamwork. This stems from the fact that robots and humans have significantly different perceptual, reasoning, communication and actuation capabilities. This paper contributes to solving this problem by proposing a knowledge-based multi-agent system to support design and execution of stereotyped (i.e. recurring) human-robot teamwork. The cooperative workflow formalism has been selected to specify team plans, and adapted to allow activities to share structured data, in a frequent basis, while executing. This novel functionality enables tightly coupled interactions among team members. Rather than focusing on automatic teamwork planning, this paper proposes a complementary and intuitive knowledge-based solution for fast deployment and adaptation of small scale human-robot teams. In addition, the system has been designed in order to provide information about the mission status, contributing this way to the human overall mission awareness problem. A set of empirical results obtained from simulated and real missions demonstrates the capabilities of the system.