  Productive and efficient human-robot teaming is a highly desirable ability in
service robots, yet there is a fundamental trade-off that a robot needs to
consider in such tasks. On the one hand, gaining information from communication
with teammates can help individual planning. On the other hand, such
communication comes at the cost of distracting teammates from efficiently
completing their goals, which can also harm the overall team performance. In
this study, we quantify the cost of interruptions in terms of degradation of
human task performance, as a robot interrupts its teammate to gain information
about their task. Interruptions are varied in timing, content, and proximity.
The results show that people find the interrupting robot significantly less
helpful. However, the human teammate's performance in a secondary task
deteriorates only slightly when interrupted. These results imply that while
interruptions can objectively have a low cost, an uninformed implementation can
cause these interruptions to be perceived as distracting. These research
outcomes can be leveraged in numerous applications where collaborative robots
must be aware of the costs and gains of interruptive communication, including
logistics and service robots.
