Audio-Visual Communication in a Two Person Gross Manipulation Task

Introduction In order to design robots suited to engage in cooperative manipulation tasks with humans, we study human-human teams as they work together to move a heavy object across a room. We are interested in several questions. First, do two person, gross motion tasks follow the same sinusoidal pattern, one person fine motion tasks do? Does performance improve when audio or visual communication is permitted? How does performance correlate with an individual's perception of performance? Non-physiological, or performance based, studies of human-human cooperation can be divided into two categories: Haptic and Non-Haptic (audio, visual, etc). The first category, involves physical interaction through the object being manipulated via force, pressure, and tactile sensations (Jones and Sarter 2008), (Reed and Peshkin 2008). Most of the non-haptic experiments are virtual setups where individuals are moving an object together on a computer screen via two controllers (Basdogan, Ho, and Srinivasan 2000), (Sallnas and Zhai 2003). A survey on the role of communication between people appears in (Whitaker, 2003). The novelty of our work is to investigate non-haptic communication in haptic manipulation tasks.