A Taxonomy of Human-Robot Teamwork Requirements

Abstract

Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in safety- and mission-critical domains where humans and robots must operate as a team to complete complex tasks. Existing requirements for Human-Robot teamwork remain fragmented across disparate sources, with no unified framework that addresses complexities of collaborative Human-Robot tasks. We address this gap by presenting a taxonomy of Human-Robot Teamwork (HRT) requirements derived from analysis of (academic and industrial) literature, standards and regulatory guidance. We extracted a construction corpus of 361 requirements from 14 cross-domain sources. Through iterative classification and refinement, we develop a two-level hierarchical taxonomy comprising 6 high-level categories and 21 low-level subcategories that distinguish information provision, relational control, decision support, safety mechanisms, performance monitoring, and foundational system capabilities. We validate the taxonomy through expert evaluation with 5 domain specialists and a utility demonstration on an independently assembled corpus of 448 requirements drawn from 19 sources spanning six HRT domains. The taxonomy classifies 412 of these requirements, with distributional patterns that converge with the construction corpus while revealing domain-specific patterns and gaps. We examine how requirements distribute across Human-Led, RobotLed and Shared operational perspectives, revealing responsibility boundaries that shape safe collaboration. This work provides a structured foundation for Requirements Engineering (RE) practitioners to systematically elicit and specify HRT capabilities.