Comparing The Performance of Explicit and Implicit Communication in Simple Object Manipulation Tasks

This paper presents two cooperative strategies that employ implicit communication (information inferred through action, in this case through sensed force) and explicit communication (information directly transferred from one individual to another, in this case through wireless data transmission) within an object manipulation task between two robots. Qualities such as reliability, efficiency and care for the object are evaluated for each strategy in a series of simple object manipulation tasks in order to produce a performance profile for the two strategies. Results show that implicit communication is the most effective strategy in simple environments, but that explicit communication outperforms implicit communication in cluttered environments.