Exploring the Cost of Interruptions in Human-Robot Teaming

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of interruptions caused by robots in human-robot teams, revealing that while humans perceive interruptions as less helpful, their actual task performance is only slightly affected, highlighting the importance of informed interruption strategies.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of interruption costs in human-robot teaming, emphasizing the importance of timing and context in robot communication strategies.

Findings

Humans perceive interruptions as less helpful.

Human task performance deteriorates slightly when interrupted.

Perceived distraction does not always match actual performance impact.

Abstract

Productive and efficient human-robot teaming is a highly desirable ability in service robots, yet there is a fundamental trade-off that a robot needs to consider in such tasks. On the one hand, gaining information from communication with teammates can help individual planning. On the other hand, such communication comes at the cost of distracting teammates from efficiently completing their goals, which can also harm the overall team performance. In this study, we quantify the cost of interruptions in terms of degradation of human task performance, as a robot interrupts its teammate to gain information about their task. Interruptions are varied in timing, content, and proximity. The results show that people find the interrupting robot significantly less helpful. However, the human teammate's performance in a secondary task deteriorates only slightly when interrupted. These results imply that while interruptions can objectively have a low cost, an uninformed implementation can cause these interruptions to be perceived as distracting. These research outcomes can be leveraged in numerous applications where collaborative robots must be aware of the costs and gains of interruptive communication, including logistics and service robots.