Attentive Monitoring for Team Coordination: a Human-Robot Convoy Example

Convoy driving requires both the leader and the follower to accomplish the task. Namely, also the leader has to monitor the following agents behavior and to adapt its own in order to not outdistance them. Our working hypothesis is that effective teamwork can be achieved by adapting periodic monitoring strategies. Inspired by the behavior of human beings, we adopted attentional mechanisms for filtering data and actively focusing the monitoring only on relevant information and agent behaviors. The robotic convoy task is accomplished via a behavior-based control architecture endowed with attentional mechanisms producing a variable frequency of the monitoring. In this paper, we consider a convoy task as a benchmark to evaluate and compare human and robot monitoring behaviors. We illustrate the various parts of the control architecture as well as present and discuss the results of experiments performed in a real world scenario with humans and robots.