Perception-intention-action cycle as a human acceptable way for improving human-robot collaborative tasks

Abstract

© ACM 2023. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in HRI '23: Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, https://doi.org/10.1145/3568294.3580149.

In Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) tasks, the classical Perception-Action cycle can not fully explain the collaborative behaviour of the human-robot pair until it is extended to Perception-Intention-Action (PIA) cycle, giving to the human's intention a key role at the same level of the robot's perception and not as a subblock of this. Although part of the human's intention can be perceived or inferred by the other agent, this is prone to misunderstandings so the true intention has to be explicitly informed in some cases to fulfill the task. Here, we explore both types of intention and we combine them with the robot's perception through the concept of Situation Awareness (SA). We validate the PIA cycle and its acceptance by the user with a preliminary experiment in an object transportation task showing that its usage can increase trust in the robot.

Peer Reviewed

Postprint (author's final draft)