The effect of action recognition and robot awareness in cooperative robot teams

Previous research in cooperative robotics has investigated several possible ways of coordinating the actions of cooperative teams -- from implicit cooperation through sensory feedback to explicit cooperation using the exchange of communicated messages. These various approaches differ in the extent to which robot team members arc aware of, or recognize, the actions of their teammates, and the extent to which they use this information to effect their own actions. The research described in this paper investigates this issue of robot awareness of team member actions and its effect on cooperative team performance by examining the results of a series of experiments on teams of physical mobile robots performing a laboratory version of hazardous waste cleanup. In these experiments. we vary the team size (and thus the level of redundancy in team member capabilities) and the level of awareness robots have of their teammates` current actions and evaluate the team`s performance using two metrics: time and energy. The results indicate that the impact of action awareness on cooperative team performance is a function not only of team size and the metric of evaluation. but also on the degree to which the effects of actions can be sensed through the world, the relative amount of work that is available per robot, and the cost of replicated actions. From these empirical studies, we propose a number of principles regarding the use of action recognition and robot awareness of team member actions in cooperative teams -- principles which will help guide engineers in the design and composition of the proper cooperative team for a given robotic mission