Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
We investigated how a team of robots in a stressful situation like search and rescue can support their human partners more holistically. Research in human-robot teamwork typically focuses on developing autonomous robots that only interact with people to coordinate with them or to establish common ground. However, going beyond improving team functioning, how can a robot help people in these high-stakes situations in a social-emotional way?
Our humanoid robots use subtle affective cues to express that they were engaged and attentive to their human teammates. In a complex search and retrieval game, players that were partnered with these type of robots felt less stressed out and were also observed to be less cognitively loaded.
We developed a system architecture to support two autonomous humanoid robots playing this game with a human player. The robots are capable of recognizing human commands, responding back using synthesized speech, searching and navigating the game arena, maintaining game state, and performing pick-and-place operations to grab baskets.