Hybrid Teams: Flexible Collaboration Between Humans, Robots and Virtual Agents

Hybrid Teams: Flexible Collaboration Between Humans, Robots and Virtual Agents
Tim Schwartz, Hans-Ulrich Krieger, Ingo Zinnikus, Christian Bürckert, Joachim Folz, Bernd Kiefer, Peter Hevesi, Christoph Lüth, Gerald Pirkl, Torsten Spieldenner, Norbert Schmitz, Malte Wirkus, Sirko Straube
Proceedings of the 14th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (Mates 2016) German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES-2016), September 27-30, Klagenfurt, Austria

Abstract:

With the increasing capabilities of agents using Artifcial Intelligence, an opportunity opens up to form teamlike collaboration between humans and artifcial agents. This paper describes the setting-up of a Hybrid Team consisting of humans, robots, virtual characters and softbots. The team is situated in a exible industrial production. Once established, Hybrid Teams can generally accomplish diverse mission scenarios. The work presented here focuses on the architecture and the characteristics of the team members and components. To achieve the overall team goals, several challenges have to be met to find a balance between autonomous behaviours of individual agents and coordinated teamwork. A Hybrid Team can heavily benefit from the heterogeneity of the team members. Humans have the highest overall intelligence, so they are always in the center of the process and take over a leading role if necessary.