Considering human's non-deterministic behavior and his availability state when designing a collaborative human-robots system

The objective of this study is to design a human-robots system that takes into account the non-deterministic nature of the human operator's behavior. Such a system is implemented in a proof of concept scenario relying on a (MO)MDP decision framework that takes advantage of an eye-tracker device to estimate the cognitive availability of the human operator, and, some human operator's inputs to deduce where he is focusing his attention. An experiment was conducted with ten participants interacting with a team of autonomous vehicles in a Search & Rescue scenario. Our results demonstrate the advantages of considering the cognitive availability of a human operator in such a complex context and also the interest of using such a decisional framework that can formally integrate the non-deterministic outcomes which model the human behavior.