Validating Human–Robot Interaction Schemes in Multitasking Environments

TLDR

Robots are becoming increasingly autonomous, freeing human operators to manage multiple robots and thereby enabling productive use of the available free time. The study introduces neglect tolerance to determine how robot autonomy and interface design enable humans to multitask and manage multirobot teams, aiming to identify the maximum number of robots, feasible team configurations, and predict team performance. The authors develop a secondary‑task measurement method to obtain neglect tolerance values, enabling humans to balance workload with robot performance.

Abstract

The ability of robots to autonomously perform tasks is increasing. More autonomy in robots means that the human managing the robot may have available free time. It is desirable to use this free time productively, and a current trend is to use this available free time to manage multiple robots. We present the notion of neglect tolerance as a means for determining how robot autonomy and interface design determine how free time can be used to support multitasking, in general, and multirobot teams, in particular. We use neglect tolerance to 1) identify the maximum number of robots that can be managed; 2) identify feasible configurations of multirobot teams; and 3) predict performance of multirobot teams under certain independence assumptions. We present a measurement methodology, based on a secondary task paradigm, for obtaining neglect tolerance values that allow a human to balance workload with robot performance.