Interaction Between Untrained Users and a Miniature Robot in a Collaborative Navigation Controlled Experiment

Abstract

Future robots are expected to be operated by untrained persons using natural means of communication. This entails the necessity of understanding how humans will communicate with such robots especially in the non-humanoid case where anthropomorphism is in its minimum. This paper presents a controlled experiment to study the interaction between untrained human users and a miniature robot in a collaborative navigation task. Three dimensions of the interaction are studied. The first dimensions is the gesture use by the operators during the interaction. A consistent usage pattern with slight cultural effect was discovered in the data. The second dimension is human adaptation to both the task requirements and robot capabilities. Three main findings about the human adaptation are reported. The third studied dimension is the effectiveness and naturalness of using motion cues as a feedback mechanism from the robot in comparison with verbal feedback. The results of the experiment showed that there is no significant difference in the task completion accuracy and time or in the feeling of naturalness between motion cues and verbal feedback, and there is a statistically significant improvement when using either of them compared with the control case. Moreover, the subjects selected the motion cues feedback mechanism more frequently as the preferred feedback modality for them. These findings support the use of nonverbal motion feedback for knowledge transfer and information acquisition from non-humanoid robots in collaborative navigation tasks.