Beyond Cooperative Robotics: The Central Role of Interdependence in Coactive Design

As automation becomes more sophisticated, the nature of its interaction with people will need to change in profound ways. Many approaches to designing more team-like cooperation between humans and machines have been proposed—most recently regrouped under the rubric of cooperative robotics. All these approaches rely on the concept of levels of autonomy as the benchmark for machine performance and the criterion for decisions about human-machine task allocation and the supervisory control regimen. This article argues that the levels of autonomy concept is incomplete and insufficient as a model for designing complex human-machine teams, largely because it does not sufficiently account for interdependence among their members. Building on a theory of joint activity, the authors introduce the notion of coactive design, an approach to human-machine interaction that takes interdependence as the central organizing principle among people and agents working together as a team.