Coordination Dynamics in Multihuman Multirobot Teams

As robots enter human environments, they will be expected to collaborate and coordinate their actions with people. In order for robots to become more fluent at this, particularly in groups, robots must be able to recognize, understand, and anticipate coordinated human activities. However, how robots engage in this process can influence the dynamics of the team, particularly in multihuman, multirobot situations. In this letter, we investigate how the presence of robots affects group coordination when both the anticipation algorithms they employ and their number (single robot or multirobot) vary. Our results suggest that group coordination is significantly affected when a robot joins a human-only group, and is further affected when a second robot joins the group and employs a different anticipation algorithm from the other robot. These findings suggest that heterogeneous behavior of robots in a multihuman group can play a major role in how group coordination dynamics stabilize (or fail), and may have implications for how we design future human-robot teams.