Once a museum guide robot is deployed in the real world, it is faced with the difficulty to deal with user utterances within a noisy environment. We present explorative analysis of the ways in which visitors signal trouble on a multimodal level when they have difficulties in understanding the robot. Such moments of trouble are investigated in the context of robot-to-group situations. Analysis will give insights into the visitors conduct at moments of trouble in robot-tosingle-user and robot-to-group interactions. In a limited data set, we found that members of a group show internal gaze coordination between each other when trouble occurs due to the robot's inadequate behavior. Implications will be drawn for further developing the interactional capabilities of an autonomous robot system to be attentive and responsive to the users' needs.
An autonomous robot system was equipped with basic means to monitor the users' success/failure in following a robot's verbal-gestural deictic reference to an object and -in case of problems -to provide additional help, i.e. to suggest a 'repair' action. A real-world field trial with the robot acting as museum guide constitutes the basis for analysis of the users' reactions to the first reference and the subsequent 'repair' action in two structurally different conditions. Results indicate that deictic 'repair' actions are mostly successful helping users to correctly orient, but they may also lead to confusion for initially correctly oriented visitors in situations of small groups of users. A recurring user practice is revealed which consists of displaying to co-visitors their understanding of the reference by pointing to the location and thus providing additional orientational help. *The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology 'CITEC' (EXC 277) (IP-18 'Interactional Coordination and Incrementality in HRI') and from the Volkswagen Foundation (Dilthey Fellowship 'Interaction and Space').KP has conducted the analysis, written the text and devised the robot's deictic practices. TD has programmed the robotic system; all authors have collaborated preparing and conducting the study) Sebastian Wrede and Timo Dankert are with CITEC. Raphaela Gehle is with the
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