Schlafly Millicent, Prabhakar Ahalya, Popovic Katarina, Schlafly Geneva, Kim Christopher, Murphey Todd D
Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
PNAS Nexus. 2024 Jan 17;3(2):pgae016. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae016. eCollection 2024 Feb.
Despite theoretical benefits of collaborative robots, disappointing outcomes are well documented by clinical studies, spanning rehabilitation, prostheses, and surgery. Cognitive load theory provides a possible explanation for why humans in the real world are not realizing the benefits of collaborative robots: high cognitive loads may be impeding human performance. Measuring cognitive availability using an electrocardiogram, we ask 25 participants to complete a virtual-reality task alongside an invisible agent that determines optimal performance by iteratively updating the Bellman equation. Three robots assist by providing environmental information relevant to task performance. By enabling the robots to act more autonomously-managing more of their own behavior with fewer instructions from the human-here we show that robots can augment participants' cognitive availability and decision-making. The way in which robots describe and achieve their objective can improve the human's cognitive ability to reason about the task and contribute to human-robot collaboration outcomes. Augmenting human cognition provides a path to improve the efficacy of collaborative robots. By demonstrating how robots can improve human cognition, this work paves the way for improving the cognitive capabilities of first responders, manufacturing workers, surgeons, and other future users of collaborative autonomy systems.
尽管协作机器人具有理论上的优势，但临床研究（涵盖康复、假肢和手术领域）已充分证明其效果令人失望。认知负荷理论为现实世界中的人类未实现协作机器人优势的原因提供了一种可能的解释：高认知负荷可能正在阻碍人类表现。我们使用心电图测量认知可用性，让25名参与者与一个通过迭代更新贝尔曼方程来确定最佳表现的无形智能体一起完成一项虚拟现实任务。三个机器人通过提供与任务表现相关的环境信息来提供协助。通过使机器人能够更自主地行动——用更少的人类指令来管理更多自身行为——我们在此表明机器人可以增强参与者的认知可用性和决策能力。机器人描述和实现其目标的方式可以提高人类对任务进行推理的认知能力，并有助于人机协作成果。增强人类认知为提高协作机器人的功效提供了一条途径。通过展示机器人如何能够改善人类认知，这项工作为提高急救人员、制造业工人、外科医生以及协作自主系统未来的其他用户的认知能力铺平了道路。
