Hybrid Teams: Flexible Collaboration Between Humans, Robots and Virtual Agents

With the increasing capabilities of agents using Artificial Intelligence, an opportunity opens up to form team like collaboration between humans and artificial agents. This paper describes the setting-up of a Hybrid Team consisting of humans, robots, virtual characters and softbots. The team is situated in a flexible industrial production. The work presented here focuses on the central architecture and the characteristics of the team members and components. To achieve the overall team goals, several challenges have to be met to find a balance between autonomous behaviors of individual agents and coordinated teamwork.