Asynchronous Training of Mixed-Role Human Actors in a Partially Observable Environment

In cooperative training, humans within a team coordinate on complex tasks, building mental models of their teammates and learning to adapt to teammates’ actions in real-time. To reduce the often prohibitive scheduling constraints associated with cooperative training, this article introduces a paradigm for cooperative asynchronous training of human teams in which trainees practice coordination with autonomous teammates rather than humans. We introduce a novel experimental design for evaluating autonomous teammates for use as training partners in cooperative training. We apply this design to a human-subjects experiment where humans are trained with either another human or an autonomous teammate and are evaluated with a new human subject in a new, partially observable, cooperative game developed for this study. Importantly, we employ an unsupervised sequential clustering methodology to partition teammate trajectories from demonstrations performed in the experiment to form a smaller number of training conditions. This results in a simpler experiment design, enabling us to conduct a complex cooperative training human-subjects study in a reasonable amount of time. Through a demonstration of the proposed experimental design, we provide takeaways and design recommendations for future research in the development of cooperative asynchronous training systems utilizing robot surrogates for human teammates.