The psychology of human-robot interaction

Japan has become a world leader in humanoid robotics, and every year, international conferences like SICE feature reports of remarkable new suites of human behaviors that have been convincingly simulated by machines. But as machines everywhere have become more capable of autonomous operation, there is an increasing awareness that the psychological dimensions of human relationships with intelligent machines must be better understood. A growing body of research has refocused attention from traditional human factors engineering to new domains in which principles and models of cognitive and social psychology are being applied to understand the interactions of humans and robots. A particular objective of this research has been the development of a fundamental understanding of how humans and autonomous machine agents can operate efficiently as teams to accomplish mission objectives and share in tasks in a way that the differing abilities of the humans and machines are used to best advantage. Research funding agencies in the United States are taking an increasing interest in the operation of mixed teams of humans and robots. In part this interest has sprung from the U.S. government mandate that by 2015 a third of all deployed military vehicles must be autonomous. It is anticipated that future teams will feature significant changes in the decision-making roles of the robot and human team members. The background for the research that will be presented in this talk includes well known U.S. DoD research programs including the DARPA MICA program and the DARPA ISAT 2005 study entitled “Embedded Humans.” In these programs, there was identified a paradigm shift from a supervisory role for humans operating semiautonomous systems to a more distributed role, involving humans both in supervisory roles at top levels of system hierarchies and also working in parity with automatons at execution levels-where resource allocations, task assignments, and execution are decided. This paradigm shift brought to the forefront the psychological aspects of humans operating on parity with automatons. Questions being addressed in ongoing research include: How are mixed human/robot team operations perceived by the humans, and how do their perceptions affect their function? The talk will emphasize research and experiments recently conducted on how humans make certain prototype decisions and how the dynamics of these decisions change over time as a function of the group dynamics. Social factors in decision dynamics will be examined. Ethical question regarding machine decisions concerning human life will also be examined.