Shared decision making in a collaborative task with reciprocal haptic feedback - an efficiency-analysis

When robots leave industrial settings, they have to be designed allowing intuitive communication with the humans they interact with. The current paper focuses on collaboration in kinesthetic tasks. Herein, we investigate decision situations. This way, the need of communication between partners can be addressed. The current paper introduces for the first time an experimental paradigm which allows studying the effect of decision making in haptic collaboration. Because reciprocal haptic feedback is challenging to provide, we analyze its efficiency in human-human collaboration to understand when it is worth to invest in this additional modality. A one degree of tracking experiment with two human partners revealed that the additional physical effort accompanying reciprocal haptic feedback is directly transformed into higher performance (compared to a control condition without reciprocal haptic feedback). Thus, the presented results motivate further research on the nature of the haptic negotiation between human partners to achieve the same performance benefits in kinesthetic collaboration with robotic partners.