An adaptive robot teacher boosts a human partner’s learning performance in joint action

Abstract

One important challenge for roboticists in the coming years will be to design robots to teach humans new skills or to lead humans in activities which require sustained motivation (e.g. physiotherapy, skills training). In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that if a robot teacher invests physical effort in adapting to a human learner in a context in which the robot is teaching the human a new skill, this would facilitate the human's learning. We also hypothesized that the robot teacher's effortful adaptation would lead the human learner to experience greater rapport in the interaction. To this end, we devised a scenario in which the iCub and a human participant alternated in teaching each other new skills. In the high effort condition, the iCub slowed down his movements when repeating a demonstration for the human learner, whereas in the low effort condition he sped the movements up when repeating the demonstration. The results indicate that participants indeed learned more effectively when the iCub adapted its demonstrations, and that the iCub's apparently effortful adaptation led participants to experience him as more helpful.

A Humanoid Robot’s Effortful Adaptation Boosts Partners’ Commitment to an Interactive Teaching Task

“…For example, for a sequence with a duration of 15 seconds, the second demonstration would be of 11 (≈15 • 0.75) seconds in the Unadaptive condition and 21 (≈15 • 1.39) seconds in the Adaptive condition. We validated that slowing down is indeed more effective in teaching than rushing, and that it is perceived as more helpful [32].…”

Spatiotemporal Coordination Supports a Sense of Commitment in Human-Robot Interaction

“…In particular, Székely et al (forthcoming; cf. also Vignolo, under review) have shown that noticing a robot's investment of effort in a joint action, beyond improving subjects' performance [17], can boost a human agent's sense of commitment, thereby enhancing their persistence and patience. The current findings extend this research by providing preliminary evidence that a second factor, namely spatiotemporal coordination, may have similar effects.…”

Using Robot Adaptivity to Support Learning in Child-Robot Interaction

“…Extending this research into the context of human-robot interaction, Székely and colleagues have recently found evidence that the perception of a robot partner's apparent investment of cognitive effort boosted people's persistence on a boring task which they performed together with a robot [23]. Building upon these previous findings, Vignolo et al have shown that if a robot invests physical effort in adapting to a human partner in a context in which the robot is teaching the human a new skill, the human partner will perform better [25] and reciprocate by investing more effort and patience in a subsequent task. In the context of child-robot-interaction, it has been shown that children are particularly willing to engage with robots that adapt their behaviours to the individual needs and abilities of the child user [1].…”

“…To verify whether a robot's apparent investment of effort into a teaching task positively impacts on children's learning, we designed an experiment in which the iCub humanoid robot and children participants alternated in teaching each other new skills. The design is inspired by [25] and adapted to make it suitable for children. In particular, the robot had to teach participants sequences of movements, by showing them with its body.…”