Human-agent-robot teamwork

Teamwork has become a widely accepted metaphor for describing the nature of multi-robot and multi-agent cooperation. By virtue of teamwork models, team members attempt to manage general responsibilities and commitments to each other in a coherent fashion that both enhances performance and facilitates recovery when unanticipated problems arise. Whereas early research on teamwork focused mainly on interaction within groups of autonomous agents or robots, there is a growing interest in leveraging human participation effectively. Unlike autonomous systems designed primarily to take humans out of the loop, many important applications require people, agents, and robots to work together in close and relatively continuous interaction. For software agents and robots to participate in teamwork alongside people in carrying out complex real-world tasks, they must have some of the capabilities that enable natural and effective teamwork among groups of people. Just as important, developers of such systems need tools and methodologies to assure that such systems will work together reliably and safely, even when they have been designed independently. The purpose of the HART workshop is to explore theories, methods, and tools in support of humans, agents and robots working together in teams. Position papers that combine findings from fields such as computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, anthropology, social and organizational psychology, human-computer interaction to address the problem of HART are strongly encouraged. The workshop will formulate perspectives on the current state-of-the-art, identify key challenges and opportunities for future studies, and promote community-building among researchers and practitioners. The workshop will be structured around four two-hour sessions on themes relevant to HART. Each session will consist of presentations and questions on selected position papers, followed by a whole-group discussion of the current state-of-the-art and the key challenges and research opportunities relevant to the theme. During the final hour, the workshop organizers will facilitate a discussion to determine next steps. The workshop will be deemed a success when collaborative scientific projects for the coming year are defined, and publication venues are explored. For example, results from the most recent HART workshop (Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, December 2010) will be reflected in a special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems on HART that is slated to appear in January/February 2012. © 2012 Authors.