Motivated by the differences between human and robot teams, we investigated the role of verbal communication between human\nteammates as they work together to move a large object to a series of target locations. Only one member of the group was\ntold the target sequence by the experimenters, while the second teammate had no target knowledge. The two experimental\nconditions we compared were haptic-verbal (teammates are allowed to talk) and haptic only (no talking allowed). The team�s\ntrajectory was recorded and evaluated. In addition, participants completed a NASA TLX-style postexperimental survey which\ngauges workload along 6 different dimensions. In our initial experiment we found no significant difference in performance when\nverbal communication was added. In a follow-up experiment, using a different manipulation task, we did find that the addition\nof verbal communication significantly improved performance and reduced the perceived workload. In both experiments, for the\nhaptic-only condition, we found that a remarkable number of groups independently improvised common haptic communication\nprotocols (CHIPs). We speculate that such protocols can be substituted for verbal communication and that the performance\ndifference between verbal and nonverbal communication may be related to how easy it is to distinguish the CHIPs from motions\nrequired for task completion.
Loading....