A robotic game to evaluate interfaces used to show and teach visual objects to a robot in real world condition

Abstract

In this paper, we present a real world user study of 4 interfaces designed to teach new visual objects to a social robot. This study was designed as a robotic game in order to maintain the user’s motivation during the whole experiment. Among the 4 interfaces 3 were based on mediator objects such as an iPhone, a Wiimote and a laser pointer. They also provided the users with different kind of feedback of what the robot is perceiving. The fourth interface was a gesture based interface with a Wizard-of-Oz recognition system added to compare our mediator interfaces with a more natural interaction. Here, we specially studied the impact the interfaces have on the quality of the learning examples and the usability. We showed that providing non-expert users with a feedback of what the robot is perceiving is needed if one is interested in robust interaction. In particular, the iPhone interface allowed non-expert users to provide better learning examples due to its whole visual feedback. Furthermore, we also studied the user’s gaming experience and found that in spite of its lower usability, the gestures interface was stated as entertaining as the other interfaces and increases the user’s feeling of cooperating with the robot. Thus, we argue that this kind of interface could be wellsuited for robotic game.