Robots that Work in Collaboration with People

Developing robots with social skills and understanding is a critical step towards enabling them to cooperate with people as capable partners, to communicate with people intuitively, and to learn quickly and effectively from natural human instruction. These abilities would enable many new and exciting applications for robots that require them to play a long-term, supportive, and helpful role in people’s daily lives. This paper describes our work towards building sociable autonomous robots that can work in collaboration with people. Our approach puts an emphasis on task dialog and social communication under the theoretical framework of joint intention theory.