Exploring the effects of gaze and pauses in situated human-robot interaction

Abstract

In this paper, we present a user study where a robot instructs a human on how to draw a route on a map, similar to a Map Task. This setup has allowed us to study user reactions to the robot’s conversational behaviour in order to get a better understanding of how to generate utterances in incremental dialogue systems. We have analysed the participants' subjective rating, task completion, verbal responses, gaze behaviour, drawing activity, and cognitive load. The results show that users utilise the robot’s gaze in order to disambiguate referring expressions and manage the flow of the interaction. Furthermore, we show that the user’s behaviour is affected by how pauses are realised in the robot’s speech.