Abstract: Expanding human span of control over teams of robots presents an obstacle to the wider deployment of robots for practical tasks in a variety of areas. One difficulty is that many different types of human interactions may be necessary to maintain and control a robot team. We have developed a characterization of human-robot tasks, and appropriate human robot interaction models, based on complexity of control that helps explicate the forms of control likely to be needed and the demands they pose to human operators. In this paper we use research from two of these areas to illustrate our taxonomy and its utility in characterizing and improving human-robot interaction.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Katia Sycara is a Professor in Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and holds the Sixth Century Chair in Computing at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She is the Director of the Laboratory for Advance Agents and Robot Technology & Semantic Technologies. She holds a B.S in Applied Mathematics from Brown University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin & PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Aegean (2004).
Dr. Sycara is a Fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE), & the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She has served as member of the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom, panel evaluation for Siemens, Sandia Labs and others. Dr. Sycara has given numerous invited talks, & has authored or co-authored more than 400 technical papers dealing with Multi-Agent and Multi-Robot Systems, Game Theory, Agents Supporting Human Teams, Human-Agent Interaction, Negotiation, Web Services, Machine Learning & the application of these techniques to crisis action planning, scheduling, manufacturing & e-commerce. Her students have won multiple best paper awards (AAMAS, 2005, 2006, ACHI 2008, BRIMS, 2004, 2005). Her robot team has won various awards in the Robocup Rescue competitions.
Dr. Sycara has led successful multimillion dollar research effort funded by DARPA, DDR&E, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, ARO, AFRL, NSF & industry. She is a founding member & served as member of the Board of Directors of the International Foundation of Multiagent Systems (IFMAS). She is a founding member of the Semantic Web Science Association, & serves as the US co-chair of the US-Europe Semantic Web Services Initiative. She has founded the journal “Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems” and served as Editor in Chief (1998-2008); she is on the Editorial Board of six additional journals.