Human-Animal Teaming as a Model for Effective Human-AI Robot Teams

Lum, Heather

Executive Summary

Dr. Lum will discuss traditional human team research foundations and how that does (and more importantly) does not translate to human- autonomous robot teaming. She will then discuss her current research examining how humans and animals work together; from the unique challenges of communicating with each other to harnessing animals' unique abilities. Dr. Lum will then dive into how we can learn about creating successful human-autonomous robot connections by modeling human-animal team dynamics. Human-animal teams have long utilized a unique dynamic to accomplish their missions. Unlike human-human teams, human-animal teams have to work together without the benefit of a common natural language so they instead must rely heavily on other communication and environmental cues in order to understand what each wants and needs from the other. The reason that we use animals, especially dogs, is because their sensory abilities (especially their olfaction) are far superior to that of any human counterpart. Similarly, we use robot entities because of their ability to go into places we can’t (such as Mars and other space missions), because of their information processing power, amongst other skills. This falls into the notion of “what’s next” as I will use the TED style talk format to discuss our specific human-animal team model. Instead of trying to make AI robot team members more human-like, as we often do, we propose to examine and use the human-animal team model to create a more effective human-robot team dynamic.

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Human-Animal Teaming as a Model for Effective Human-AI Robot Teams

Executive Summary