Title: AI Challenges in Human-Robot Cognitive Teaming,
Abstract: Among the many anticipated roles for robots in the future is that of being a
human teammate. Aside from all the technological hurdles that have to be
overcome with respect to hardware and control to make robots fit to work with
humans, the added complication here is that humans have many conscious and
subconscious expectations of their teammates - indeed, we argue that teaming is
mostly a cognitive rather than physical coordination activity. This introduces
new challenges for the AI and robotics community and requires fundamental
changes to the traditional approach to the design of autonomy. With this in
mind, we propose an update to the classical view of the intelligent agent
architecture, highlighting the requirements for mental modeling of the human in
the deliberative process of the autonomous agent. In this article, we outline
briefly the recent efforts of ours, and others in the community, towards
developing cognitive teammates along these guidelines.