Predictability or adaptivity? Designing robot handoffs modeled from trained dogs and people

One goal of assistive robotics is to design interactive robots that can help disabled people with tasks such as fetching objects. When people do this task, they coordinate their movements closely with receivers. We investigated how a robot should fetch and give household objects to a person. To develop a model for the robot, we first studied trained dogs and person-to-person handoffs. Our findings suggest two models of handoff that differ in their predictability and adaptivity.