AI Challenges in Human-Robot Cognitive Teaming

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and necessary AI advancements for robots to effectively act as human cognitive teammates, emphasizing mental modeling and cognitive coordination.

Contribution

It proposes an updated agent architecture emphasizing mental modeling of humans and reviews recent efforts in developing cognitive teammates.

Findings

Highlighting the importance of mental modeling in human-robot teaming

Proposing a revised architecture for autonomous agents in collaborative settings

Summarizing recent research efforts in cognitive teammate development

Abstract

Among the many anticipated roles for robots in the future is that of being a human teammate. Aside from all the technological hurdles that have to be overcome with respect to hardware and control to make robots fit to work with humans, the added complication here is that humans have many conscious and subconscious expectations of their teammates - indeed, we argue that teaming is mostly a cognitive rather than physical coordination activity. This introduces new challenges for the AI and robotics community and requires fundamental changes to the traditional approach to the design of autonomy. With this in mind, we propose an update to the classical view of the intelligent agent architecture, highlighting the requirements for mental modeling of the human in the deliberative process of the autonomous agent. In this article, we outline briefly the recent efforts of ours, and others in the community, towards developing cognitive teammates along these guidelines.