Effective Task Allocation in Ad Hoc Human-Agent Teams.

With accelerated progress in autonomous agent capabilities, mixed human and agent teams will become increasingly commonplace in both our personal and professional spheres. Hence, further examination of factors affecting collaboration efficacy in these types of teams are needed to inform the design and use of effective human-agent teams. Ad hoc human-agent teams, where team members interact without prior experience with teammates and only for a limited number of interactions, will be commonplace in dynamic environments with short opportunity windows for collaboration between diverse groups. We study ad-hoc team scenarios pairing a human with an agent where both need to assess and adapt to the capabilities of the partner to maximize team performance. In this work, we investigate the relative efficacy of two human-agent collaboration protocols that differ in the team member responsible for allocating tasks to the team. We designed, implemented, and experimented with an environment in which human-agent teams repeatedly collaborate to complete heterogeneous task sets.