Studies of human-robot interaction in dynamic and unstructured environments show that as more advanced robotic capabilities are deployed, the need for cooperative competencies to support collaboration with human problem-holders increases. Designing human-robot systems to meet these demands requires an explicit understanding of the work functions and constraints that shape the feasibility of alternative joint work strategies. Yet existing human-robot interaction frameworks either emphasize computational support for real-time execution or rely on static representations for design, offering limited support for reasoning about coordination dynamics during early-stage conceptual design. To address this gap, this article presents a novel computational framework for analyzing joint work strategies in human-robot systems by integrating techniques from functional modeling with graph-theoretic representations. The framework characterizes collective work in terms of the relationships among system functions and the physical and informational structure of the work environment, while explicitly capturing how coordination demands evolve over time. Its use during conceptual design is demonstrated through a case study in disaster robotics, which shows how the framework can be used to support early trade-space exploration of human-robot coordination strategies and to identify cooperative competencies that support flexible management of coordination overhead. These results show how the framework makes coordination demands and their temporal evolution explicit, supporting design-time reasoning about cooperative competency requirements and work demands prior to implementation.

翻译：在动态和非结构化环境中的人机交互研究表明，随着更先进的机器人能力被部署，支持与人类问题持有者协作所需的协同能力需求日益增长。设计满足这些需求的人机系统需要明确理解工作功能与约束条件，这些条件决定了替代性联合工作策略的可行性。然而，现有的人机交互框架要么强调实时执行的计算支持，要么依赖静态表示进行设计，对早期概念设计阶段协调动态的推理支持有限。为弥补这一不足，本文提出了一种新颖的计算框架，通过将功能建模技术与图论表示相结合，分析人机系统中的联合工作策略。该框架从系统功能间关系以及工作环境的物理与信息结构角度描述集体工作，同时明确捕捉协调需求随时间演变的过程。通过一个灾难救援机器人领域的案例研究，展示了该框架在概念设计阶段的应用，表明其如何支持人机协同策略的早期权衡空间探索，并识别支持协调开销灵活管理的协同能力。这些结果表明，该框架使协调需求及其时间演变过程显式化，支持在实施前对协同能力需求和工作需求进行设计时推理。