2020/10/10 by Richard G. Freedman, Steven J. Levine, Freedman, Richard G. +5
Computer Science · Engineering · Psychology · #AI-based Problem Solving and Planning #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Automation Interaction and Safety #Robot Manipulation and Learning #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2010.04914
openalex publication_date 2020/10/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As robotic teammates become more common in society, people will assess the robots' roles in their interactions along many dimensions. One such dimension is effectiveness: people will ask whether their robotic partners are trustworthy and effective collaborators. This begs a crucial question: how can we quantitatively measure the helpfulness of a robotic partner for a given task at hand? This paper seeks to answer this question with regards to the interactive robot's decision making. We describe a clear, concise, and task-oriented metric applicable to many different planning and execution paradigms. The proposed helpfulness metric is fundamental to assessing the benefit that a partner has on a team for a given task. In this paper, we define helpfulness, illustrate it on concrete examples from a variety of domains, discuss its properties and ramifications for planning interactions with humans, and present preliminary results.