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5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
To our knowledge, this paper contributes with a pio-
neering step towards exploitation of knowledge based
techniques in human-robot teamwork. The goal was
to enable cooperative execution of stereotyped tasks,
essential in demanding scenarios, where timely deci-
sion making is required. The cooperative workflow
formalism, usually employed for business oriented
human organisations, was selected.
Clear distinctions on the way humans and robots
interact required the workflow formalism to be
adapted. Some adaptations were suggested, with par-
ticular focus on data-flow links. These links en-
able the implementation of tightly coupled coordina-
tion. This ability is usually disregarded in works of
both theoretical teamwork and cooperative workflow
fields, which typically focus on high-level tasks with
sporadic interactions. Although multi-robots litera-
ture is more concerned with tightly coupled coordina-
tion, it lacks a structural approach to cope with the hu-
man factor. This paper presented a multi-agent system
that explicitly considers the human. First, the work-
flow formalism is usually employed by humans and
consequently natural to them. Second, by consider-
ing different message exchanging protocols and sys-
tem level activity parameters, both human and robot
asymmetries are explicitly taken into account. Third,
human readable information is formally attached to
the ontology concepts used by the human participant.
As future work we expect to make use of nested
workflows. In addition, the abstraction of human-
robot sub-teams as work-flow participants will also
be subject of analysis. Dynamic invocation of team
sub-plans will be pursued as a way of applying well
known stereotyped problem solvers (i.e. mission tem-
plates) to the situation at hand. Robustness against
communication channels degradation must be further
studied. Handshaking and message aging policies
must be analysed, separately, for the human-robot and
robot-robot interaction cases. A thorough analysis of
non-expert user friendliness is still missing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Paulo Santos and Carlos Cˆandido for
proofreading. The work was partially supported by
FCT/MCTES grant No. SFRH/BD/27305/2006.
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