Collaborative fluency is the coordinated meshing of joint activities between members of a well-synchronized team. Two people repeatedly performing an activity together naturally converge to a high level of coordination, resulting in a fluent meshing of their actions. In contrast, human-robot interaction is often structured in a rigid stop-and-go fashion. We aim to build robotic agents that can work side-by-side humans by displaying the kind of fluency that humans are accustomed to from each other.
This research is concerned with models, metrics, algorithms, and human-subject studies related to the fluent meshing of human-robot joint activities.