Investigate physical information gathering, sensor modalities, and cooperative and distributed sensing; and
Investigate alternate robot-human communication modalities (e.g., voice, gesture, visual, movement, tactile) to enhance cooperation amongst team members.
Investigate innovative programming languages/paradigms for robots;
Develop robust, easy-to-use infrastructure for software, hardware, and systems;
Develop techniques that would facilitate shareable physical testbeds, especially techniques to make existing testbeds easily available communally; and
Develop shareable resources, such as software and data.
Investigate the impact of ubiquitous co-robots on social and economic equality;
Investigate needed economic and governance policies;
Investigate ethical and legal issues related to ubiquitous co-robots;
Investigate issues related to teamwork and integration, partnerships, and worker training for collaboration with robots; and
Develop innovative uses for co-robots in education (see also Section II. C).
Department of Defense’s trusted human-robot teaming
(1) investigating socially-designed cues such as humanoid appearance, voice, personality, and other social elements on human trust and overall human-robot team performance;
(2) physical «embodiment» features versus non-physical features to determine which have the most influence on human trust and performance;
(3) sensing of human intent, cognitive and affective states, such as workload, stress, fatigue and fear;
(4) modeling the processes of high-performing human teams, such as teammate monitoring, backup behavior, joint attention, shared mental models, coordination and negotiation;
(5) dynamic modeling of the human-robot partnerships to allow continuous improvement of joint performance in real-world applications;
(6) investigations regarding the effectiveness of various models of human-robot interaction, such as delegation and supervisory control;