Role Switching in Task-Oriented Multimodal Human-Robot Collaboration

In a collaborative task and the interaction that accompanies it, the participants often take on distinct roles, and dynamically switch the roles as the task requires. A domestic assistive robot thus needs to have similar capabilities. Using our previously proposed Multimodal Interaction Manager (MIM) framework, this paper investigates how role switching for a robot can be implemented. It identifies a set of primitive subtasks that encode common interaction patterns observed in our data corpus and that can be used to easily construct complex task models. It also describes an implementation on the NAO robot that, together with our original work, demonstrates that the robot can take on different roles. We provide a detailed analysis of the performance of the system and discuss the challenges that arise when switching roles in human-robot interactions.