Exploring Human-Robot Interaction Through Telepresence Board Games

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental test bed for exploring and evaluating human-robot interaction (HRI). Our system is designed around the concept of playing board games involving collaboration between humans and robots in a shared physical environment. Unlike the classic human-versusmachine situation often established in computer-based board games, our test bed takes advantage of the rich interaction opportunities that arise when humans and robots play collaboratively as a team. To facilitate interaction within a shared physical environment, our game is played on a large checkerboard where human and robotic players can be situated and play as game pieces. With meaningful interaction occurring within this controlled setup, various aspects of human-robot interaction can be easily explored and evaluated such as interaction methods and robot behaviour. In this paper we present our test bed which uses a telepresence interface for playing the game and the results of a user study demonstrating the sensitivity of our system in assessing the effect of different robot behaviours on users.

The Effect of Emotions and Social Behavior on Performance in a Collaborative Serious Game Between Humans and Autonomous Robots

“…On the other hand, the human collaborator was perceived as more credible and socially present, but it had no effect on the actual performance on the task as there was no significant difference in participant's performance between the collaborator conditions. Current results support the notion that understanding emotional and social cues underlying such collaboration from the human perspective, it would be possible to design more helpful and intelligent robots which act according to behavioral patterns that humans can understand and relate to [31]. Especially if we consider humans who will have a longer and more meaningful interaction with robot collaborators, as this study found that those individuals reported higher scores on all of the perceived social categories, except on the Reliability.…”

“…The "Sheep and Wolves" is a classic board game, where humans and robots collaborate as independent members of the wolf team. They hunt a single sheep in an attempt to surround it [27,31]. In the "Tic-tac-toe" game the robot and a human can move game pieces on a physical board and collaborate as equals [41].…”

“…The contributions of this paper are: (1) to investigate how people perceive robots as social agents in shared-task spaces, capable of interacting with human collaborators, and how it affects performance on a task; (2) understand how social cues of robot collaborators elicit emotions and how those cues are perceived as social categories, affecting the performance of human partners performing collaboratively on s shared game task; (3) understanding both HHI and HRI in regards to perception of social categories and elicited emotions, bringing results in relation with performance on a game task. These insights could provide a deeper understanding of how emotions and social categories underlie such an interaction from the human collaborator perspective, potentially informing the design of more meaningful collaborative game tasks that would use helpful and intelligent robot collaborators which act according to behavioral patterns that humans can understand and relate to [31].…”

Playing Games with Robots - A Method for Evaluating Human-Robot Interaction

“…1. ) is our attempt to evaluate human-robot interaction through the use of games (Xin & Sharlin, 2006). We are particularly interested in the social aspects of collaboration between humans and robots such as teamwork and group dynamics.…”

“…We asked participants to play one game in each condition and assessed the gameplay experience with post-test questionnaires. We performed the pilot study with 5 participants and the actual study with 14 participants (Xin & Sharlin, 2006). One of the interesting results found in the pilot study was that human players trusted the assertive robots more than the submissive robots when it comes to decision making.…”