Human Coordination Dynamics with Heterogeneous Robots in a Team

Robots with different behaviors will be a part of human-robot teams in the future and will impact the overall interaction patterns of teams. In this paper, we investigate how the presence of robots affect the coordination of human-robot teams when a single robot or multiple robots with the same or different behavior are the part of that team. We compare two different event anticipation methods for robots, and then extend those findings to assess its effects on the group coordination. Our results indicate that humans are significantly more synchronous as a group when they danced alone than with the robots. We also find that an addition of a robot with a different anticipation algorithm to a single robot team significantly reduces the group synchrony. This work will prove useful for the robotics community to build more fluent human-robot interactions in the future.