Confronting barriers to human-robot cooperation: balancing efficiency and risk in machine behavior.

Many technical and psychological challenges make it difficult to design machines that effectively cooperate with people. To better understand these challenges, we conducted a series of studies investigating human-human, robot-robot, and human-robot cooperation in a strategically rich resource-sharing scenario, which required players to balance efficiency, fairness, and risk. In these studies, both human-human and robot-robot dyads typically learned efficient and risky cooperative solutions when they could communicate.