Evaluating the Effectiveness of Nonverbal Communication in Human-Robot Interaction

摘要

We evaluate the effectiveness of the type of directions given by a robot in a joint-activity task. The joint-activity task we focus on involves a humanoid robot giving directions to a human subject in exploring an unknown environment and finding objects hidden in certain locations inside the environment. The experiment is conducted in the form of a between-group study with 8 participants in which one group is provided directions by the robot verbally and the other group is given nonverbal directions in the form of hand gestures and gaze direction. Our findings show that the type of directions given by the robot do have a noticeable impact on the performance of the human subjects in the experiment. Specifically, the group which is given nonverbal directions by the robot is on average 70% quicker in finding all the hidden objects than the group which is given verbal directions. We evaluate the hypothesis from prior research that the reason for this discrepancy is correlated with the reduced perceived mental workload of the activity by the human subjects when the robot provides nonverbal directions, with the help of post-experiment survey responses provided by the participants of our study groups.