Human-Human Inspired Task and Object Definition for Astronaut-Robot Cooperation

This paper presents a comparison of three different speech based task communication methods using a simulated astronaut-robot geological exploration mission as a test case. The conventional task communication method, in which the astronaut needs to communicate both the action and target, is compared against communication methods where object affordances, i.e. object action possibilities, are used to complete the task definition. The idea of this object affordances based approach is to transfer the cognitive object-action association process from the astronaut to the robot. The user test campaign described in this paper, performed with a fully autonomous centauroid robot, shows that the use of only the action name or action target name in the task communication can be successfully used to lower the workload of the test persons. The robot’s capability to understand object-action associations introduces also a viable mechanism to add error tolerance to the communication as the astronaut has always alternative ways to make the required tasks communicated.