Robot-Supported Cooperative Work: A Shared-Shopping Scenario

Computer-support cooperative work has been studied extensively and achieved applications that are widely useful. However, there was not much emphasis on support through robots for cooperative work. So, there is no deep understanding of what is needed to support tasks that involve individually moving communication partners and for which the physical context is relevant. This work shows an example of robot-supported cooperative work, where two robots communicate with each other to indirectly support communication between their human users. This example is a shared-shopping scenario. For its realization, we make use of high-level discourse models both for specifying communication between a robot shopping cart and its human user, and between two robot carts. The emerging communication from such intertwined discourses supports a shared (shopping) task of their two human users, who collaborate based on the shopping list shared in this way. Such support is important in a setting where the physical context is relevant, e.g., the vicinity to products.