Affordance-based modeling of a human-robot cooperative system for area exploration

The cooperation of humans and robots is ubiquitous in modern systems, while human ability to cooperate has been limitedly investigated in terms of systems theory. A formal model is proposed to describe the human capability for the cooperation based on the finite state automata (FSA) and the affordances theory. Unlike the previous studies focused on conceptual approaches, real and virtual experiments are conducted to investigate human actions in a cooperative system with a human and a robot. A modeling scheme is provided to implement agent-based simulations for the cooperative system using the proposed affordance-based FSA. The developed simulation for the cooperation problem can reproduce the patterns of the actual experiments in terms of affordances and supervisory capability. The modular architecture of the agent-based framework allows establishing open-ended algorithms for action selections with their isolated effects under physical constraints, which need to be revised to deal with human-involved cooperation problems.