Productive and efficient human-robot teaming is a highly desirable ability in service robots, yet there is a fundamental trade-off that a robot needs to consider in such tasks. On the one hand, gaining information from communication with teammates can help individual planning. On the other hand, such communication comes at the cost of distracting teammates from efficiently completing their goals, which can also harm the overall team performance. In this study, we quantify the cost of interruptions in terms of degradation of human task performance, as a robot interrupts its teammate to gain information about their task. Interruptions are varied in timing, content, and proximity. The results show that people find the interrupting robot significantly less helpful. However, the human teammate's performance in a secondary task deteriorates only slightly when interrupted. These results imply that while interruptions can objectively have a low cost, an uninformed implementation can cause these interruptions to be perceived as distracting. These research outcomes can be leveraged in numerous applications where collaborative robots must be aware of the costs and gains of interruptive communication, including logistics and service robots.

翻译：高效且富有成效的人机协作是服务机器人极为期望的能力，然而在此类任务中，机器人需要权衡一个基本矛盾：一方面，通过与队友的通信获取信息有助于个体规划；另一方面，这种通信会分散队友高效完成目标的注意力，从而可能损害整体团队表现。本研究量化了机器人因获取任务信息而中断队友时，干扰对人类任务绩效退化造成的成本。干扰在时机、内容及交互距离上均有变化。结果表明，人们认为干扰性机器人的帮助性显著降低，但人类队友在次要任务上的绩效仅轻微下降。这些发现表明，尽管干扰客观上可能成本较低，但缺乏合理规划的实施会导致这类干扰被感知为分散注意力。该研究成果可应用于需要协作机器人意识到干扰式通信的成本与收益的多种场景，包括物流机器人和服务机器人。