Specialization in Dyadic Shared Manual Tasks
Masters Thesis for Kyle Reed at Northwestern University, 2004.
Abstact:
In many everyday tasks two people interact through force and motion. Examples include lifting and positioning a bulky object, teaching manual skills, dancing, and handing off a baton or a drinking glass. These tasks involve a communication channel between two people distinct from spoken language and gestures, yet still containing information. Understanding how two humans communicate and cooperate physically is important in dual-control situations, for robots that provide powered assistance in human-human tasks (such as physical therapy) and in designing a robot that physically interacts with humans.
In this thesis, I describe my experiments on two subjects cooperating on a 1 degree of freedom task. I characterize the interaction forces between the two subjects, dividing them into a productive "net force" and a conflicting "difference force". I show that many individuals can be faster as a dyad than they can be individually. My results suggest that dyads can develop a specialization into different roles.
Original found in:
Kyle B. Reed. "Specialization in Dyadic Shared Manual Tasks," Masters Thesis, Northwestern University, December 2004. [ pdf ]
Back to Kyle Reed's page in LIMS.
Last updated by KBR on 12/21/04.