Non-Dyadic Entrainment for Industrial Tasks

In order to achieve efficient collaboration during task completion in groups, temporal alignment is essential, i.e., synchronisation. We believe that efficient entrainment in mixed human-robot teams can positively affect human-robot collaboration. However, few studies have investigated how groups of humans entrain with each other to acquire new knowledge transferable to human-robot collaboration. This paper proposes a study design to get new insights into how dyads and triads of human workers entrain in assembly tasks simulating the industrial context. We argue that the investigation of both dyadic and non-dyadic (i.e., triadic) configurations is essential, as this will give us insights into how, and if, the complexity of reaching temporal synchronisation through entrainment increases with additional actors. Lastly, we propose a follow-up study investigating how the mechanisms utilised in human-human entrainment can be replicated in an industrial robot, ultimately improving human-robot collaboration in mixed teams.