A Web-based Mixed Reality Interface Facilitating Explicit Agent-oriented Interactions for Human-Robot Collaboration

Communicating and recognizing intent is a crucial part of human-robot collaboration (HRC). It prevents competing and turn-taking behaviour that would otherwise lead to inefficient and unsafe collaborative activities. This study presents a novel approach towards enabling standards-based explicit bidirectional intent communication. The approach entails projecting a tailored web-based user interface upon the worktable shared between a human and robot agent. The interface has a close integration with an agent framework (JADE) that allows intent communication via mechanisms standardized by the IEEE Computer Society. The interaction model is discussed for its rationale and the possibilities it exposes as future work.