Abstract

On the farm of the future, a human agriculturist collaborates with both human and automated labourers in order to perform a wide range of tasks. Today, changes in traditional farming practices motivate robotics researchers to consider ways in which automated devices and intelligent systems can work with farmers to address diverse needs of farming. Because farming tasks can be highly specialised, though often repetitive, a human-robot approach is a natural choice. The work presented here investigates a collaborative task in which a human and robot share decision making about the readiness of strawberries for harvesting, based on visual inspection. Two different robot behaviours are compared: one in which the robot provides decisions with more false positives and one in which the robot provides decisions with more false negatives. Preliminary experimental results conducted with human subjects are presented and show that the robot behaviour with more false positives is preferred in completing this task.