The First Segway Soccer Experience: Towards Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Teams

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on human-robot interaction in a team task where we identify the need for peer-to-peer (P2P) teamwork among robots and humans. We define a P2P team as one where there is no fixed hierarchy for decision making. Instead, all team members are equal participants and decision making is truly distributed. We have fully developed a P2P team within Segway Soccer, a research domain that we have introduced to explore the challenge of P2P coordination in human-robot teams in dynamic, adversarial tasks. Segway soccer builds upon RoboCup robot soccer, a research domain with standardized tasks for comparing multi-robot team strategies. We recently participated in the first Segway Soccer games between two competing teams at the 2005 RoboCup US Open. We believe these games are the first ever between two human-robot P2P teams. Based on the competition, we realized two different approaches to P2P teams. We present our robot-centric approach to P2P team coordination and contrast it to the human-centric approach of the opponent team. Based on our analysis, we recommend a set of further refinements to the Segway Soccer domain to foster more effective P2P teams