Role Distribution in Synchronous Human-Robot Joint Action

Robots are becoming a part of our daily lives, and humans and robots are beginning to work together as teams to achieve common goals. In a human-robot interaction (HRI) scenario, it is important to assign roles to both the human and the robot, as these role assignments may affect the fluidity and the effectiveness of the interaction. In this paper, we discuss different role distribution models to assign roles among humans and robots in the context of synchronous joint action. We employed the leader-follower model in a humanrobot collaborative task using a method from our previous work to detect synchronous actions of team members. Our results support our choice of the leader-follower model, and suggest that our method is capable of measuring synchronous joint action in an HRI scenario. These results are encouraging for future work aimed at the development of adept human-robot teamwork.