Intermediary assist for Cooperative Works: Quantification technique of Concern for Others

This paper addresses a quantification technique of cooperative characteristics focusing on Concern For Others: CFO in a cooperative work by multiple participants. The CFO is utilized for objective evaluation of human altruism. We have two goals of this research are to realize a mediate assist system for cooperative tasks and to develop a training tool of social skill for persons with autism. Most of studies on human-machine systems have been considered to assist a single operator. Here, we focused on a cooperative task by multiple participants. In this case, the command input of each operator includes CFO to achieve suitable cooperation. The CFO, however, may bring about misreading of the player´s intention to give a suitable assist for the system. Thus the COF is expected to work as a filter to obtain operators characteristics accurately in such tasks. On the other hands, if the CFO can be obtained by the system, a new assist scheme to help their cooperation as a mediator will be invented. As a first step of such assist systems, a cooperative work platform employing haptic interface without force sensors is developed. The cooperative task is very simple and intuitive as controlling a ball on the plate whose edges are held by multiple humans. To obtain CFO in this task, the human input pattern during a solo work was learned by CMAC before the cooperative task. Then, the difference between an input command in cooperative work and the predicted command in the solo one is defined as the CFO. Finally, this paper addresses the technique to obtain CFO and the applications with it is discussed.