Models of Human Behavior for Human–Robot Interaction and Automated Driving: How Accurate Do the Models of Human Behavior Need to Be?

There are many examples of cases where access to improved models of human behavior and cognition has allowed the creation of robots that can better interact with humans, and not least in road vehicle automation, this is a rapidly growing area of research. Human–robot interaction (HRI) therefore provides an important applied setting for human behavior modeling—but given the vast complexity of human behavior, how complete and accurate do these models need to be? Here, we outline some possible ways of thinking about this problem, starting from the suggestion that modelers need to keep the right end goal in sight: a successful HRI, in terms of safety, performance, and human satisfaction. Efforts toward model completeness and accuracy should be focused on those aspects of human behavior to which interaction success is most sensitive.