The paper introduces a comprehensive human-agent negotiation framework designed to facilitate the development and evaluation of research studies on human-agent negotiation without building each component from scratch. Leveraging the interoperability and reusability of its components, this framework offers various functionalities, including speech-to-text conversion, emotion recognition, a repository of negotiation strategies, and an interaction manager capable of managing gestures designed for Nao, Pepper, and QT, and coordinating message exchanges in a turn-taking fashion. This framework aims to lower the entry barrier for researchers in human-agent negotiation by providing a versatile platform that supports a wide range of research directions, including affective computing, natural language processing, decision-making, and non-verbal communication.

Social robots are becoming prevalent in our society, and most of the time, they need to interact with humans in order to accomplish their tasks. Negotiation is one of the inevitable processes they need to be involved to make joint decisions with their human counterparts when there is a conflict of interest between them. This paper pursues a novel approach for a humanoid robot to negotiate with humans efficiently via speech. In this work, we propose a speech-based negotiation protocol in which agents make their offers in a turn-taking fashion via speech. We present a variant of time-based concession bidding strategy for the humanoid robot and evaluated the performance of the robot against human counterpart in human-robot negotiation experiments.

Designing agents aiming to negotiate with human counterparts requires additional factors. In this work, we analyze the main elements of human negotiations in a structured human experiment. Particularly, we focus on studying the effect of negotiators being aware of the other side’s gain on the bidding behavior and the negotiation outcome. We compare the negotiations in two settings where one allows human negotiators to see their opponent’s utility and the other does not. Furthermore, we study what kind of emotional state expressed and arguments sent in those setups. We rigorously discuss the findings from our experiments.