HARMONIC: Cognitive and Control Collaboration in Human-Robotic Teams

TL;DR

HARMONIC is a novel cognitive-robotic architecture that enables human-robot teams to coordinate, communicate naturally, and build mutual trust through explainability and metacognition, demonstrated via simulation experiments.

Contribution

This work introduces HARMONIC, integrating cognitive and control systems for improved human-robot teaming with natural language and explainability features.

Findings

Robots coordinate actions effectively in heterogeneous teams.

HARMONIC robots reason about plans, goals, and team attitudes.

Robots provide clear explanations for their decisions.

Abstract

This paper describes HARMONIC, a cognitive-robotic architecture that integrates the OntoAgent cognitive framework with general-purpose robot control systems applied to human-robot teaming (HRT). HARMONIC incorporates metacognition, meaningful natural language communication, and explainability capabilities required for developing mutual trust in HRT. Through simulation experiments involving a joint search task performed by a heterogeneous team of two HARMONIC-based robots and a human operator, we demonstrate heterogeneous robots that coordinate their actions, adapt to complex scenarios, and engage in natural human-robot communication. Evaluation results show that HARMONIC-based robots can reason about plans, goals, and team member attitudes while providing clear explanations for their decisions, which are essential requirements for realistic human-robot teaming.