Comparing Laboratory User Studies and Video-Enhanced Web Surveys for Eliciting User Gestures in Human-Robot Interactions

Abstract

Laboratory studies are time consuming and costly. We aimed to examine whether the gestures users naturally select to communicate commands to a mobile robot during a laboratory user study can be comparable to those selected during an online video-enhanced survey. 64 participants were divided into two experimental groups according to the interaction methodology. In both conditions, participants instructed the robot to perform eight different tasks using only upper body gestures. For 7 of the 8 tasks we did not find evidence that that the physical gestures by which the participants chose to communicate with the robot depended on the interaction methodology. Our investigation, while still preliminary, may suggest that video enhanced surveys can be used for human robot interaction design and evaluation, especially in the preliminary stages of defining users' existing mental models and expectations.