Global Progress or Local Intent? Exploring Human Perceptions of Communication Strategies in Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

Human-robot collaboration has become increasingly complex and dynamic, highlighting the need for effective and intuitive communication. Two communication strategies for robots have been explored: (i) global-perspective strategy to share an overview of task progress, aimed at achieving consensus on completed and upcoming tasks; and (ii) local-perspective strategy to share the robot’s intent, aimed at conveying the robot’s immediate intentions and next actions. However, existing studies merely rely on the distinct focus to differentiate between the use of different strategies, lacking a deeper exploration of how these strategies affect user perceptions and responses in practice. For example, a possible concern could be which strategy is more likely to inspire human effort in collaboration. To this end, this paper conducts a user experiment (N = 15) within a collaborative cooking scenario, and provides design insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy from three dimensions to inform the design of human-sensitive communication.