How Robot Verbal Feedback Can Improve Team Performance in Human-Robot Task Collaborations

We detail an approach to planning effective verbal feedback during pairwise human-robot task collaboration. The approach is motivated by social science literature as well as existing work in robotics and is applicable to a variety of task scenarios. It consists of a dynamic, synthetic task implemented in an augmented reality environment. The result is combined robot task control and speech production, allowing the robot to actively participate and communicate with its teammate. A user study was conducted to experimentally validate the efficacy of the approach on a task in which a single user collaborates with an autonomous robot. The results demonstrate that the approach is capable of improving both objective measures of team performance and the user's subjective evaluation of both the task and the robot as a teammate.