Some ways to help robots work together with Humans.

     Ways to help Robots work together with Humans.

      

Different jobs.

Robots should do things they are best at, or that people don’t want to do – like lifting heavy items, testing chemicals and crunching data. That frees up people to do what they’re best at  like adapting to changing situations and coming up with creative solutions to problems.

A human-robot surgical team might have a human surgeon conducting laparoscopic or minimally invasive surgery with assistance from a robot. manipulator with cameras that is inserted into the patient and operated externally by the surgeon. The view can be augmented by overlaying medical imaging data on the patient’s internal anatomy on the camera view.

Mutual backup.

Teammates need to understand their own roles and those of the rest of the team, and how they fit together. They also need to be able to use this knowledge to avoid stepping on teammates’ toes, while anticipating others’ potential needs. Robots and artifical intelligence need to understand how their parts of the task relate to the parts their teammates are doing, and how they might be able to help as needed.

 Common understanding.

The benefit of shared knowledge allows all sorts of collaborations and coordinations. For instance, when inflating a hot air balloon, the pilot is at one end, in the basket monitoring the burner. A crew member must be at the far end of the balloon, steadying it by holding a rope attached to its top. They can’t see or hear each other because the balloon blocks the view and the propane burner drowns out any other sound. But if they’re trained well, neither needs to communicate to know what the other is doing, and know what needs to happen next.

Effective interaction and communication.

Team members need to interact; effective teaming depends greatly on the quality of those interactions. In hospital teams for emergency resuscitation of patients. Those teams are often made up of whatever medical personnel are nearest to the patient, and members need to know right away what happened before the patient’s heart stopped  a life is at stake.

It’s not even clear if typical human communication is the best model for human-robot teams. Human dogs team do fine without the use of natural language.

Mutual trust

Interpersonal trust is important in human teams. If trust breaks down among a team of firefighters, they’ll be less effective and may cost lives – each other’s or members of the public they’re trying to help. The best robot teammates will be trustworthy and reliable  and any breaches in reliability need to be explained.

But even with an explanation, technology that is chronically unreliable is likely to be rejected by human teammates. That’s even more vital in safety-critical technology, like autonomous vehicles.

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