Social cooperation analysis for multi-user cooperative tasks

This paper addresses evaluation methods for social cooperation characteristics in cooperative tasks. Using these we found that the ratio of four typical indexes relate to task performance. Most of conventional human-machine systems assumed to assist only a single operator. In such cases, the system should only pay attention to his/her intention or operation characteristics. If there were multiple operators they also included social behaviours affected from others. Such behaviours could not be regarded by the one-on-one assist systems. Since intelligent assist systems are expected to apply in human society, the system requires work among humans. A challenge of our research is to quantify the human social characteristics, especially when relating to cooperation in the task involving multiple operators. In this paper, human social characteristics are quantified in order to evaluate cooperative performance. For the evaluations, ratio indexes by four kinds of behaviours are focused on. One is observation behaviour for other operator´s work, which is typical social behaviour in a cooperative task. Second is the ratio of approaching to other robots for physical supporting. Third, total activity by summation of robot motion distance. Then, an index of visibility of robots each other. Finally, correlation between expansion of the index distribution and a task completion time is analyzed. Furthermore advanced assist using the evaluation is discussed.