What Information Should a Robot Convey?

摘要

Robotic technologies are becoming pervasive within industrial and domestic settings, resulting in more frequent interactions between humans and robots. To ensure these interactions are effective, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers have argued that robots and humans must establish a shared common ground by communicating fundamental pieces of information to each other, such as their intentions, goals, plans, status, etc. Although a large body of work has explored how robots might signal individual aspects of such information to users, we still know relatively little regarding the importance of such information overall (e.g., is communicating robot status more important than communicating robot goals?). Such information is necessary for robots acting in the wild to create prioritized lists of communicative goals as, at any given time, it is unlikely that a robot will be able to convey all possibly relevant or important aspects of information to users. Prioritizing information for users is a complex problem as many factors might influence information priority, including task context, user expertise, and robot capability. In this work, we first address the current state-of-the-art signaling methods for non-humanoid robots. Second, we take an initial step towards understanding prioritization by exploring what types of information users request, and how the rankings of informational importance that users assign change, in a prototypical shared-environment interaction with three different types of robots. Our results, collected from 150 participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, generally show that users value information related to the robot’s battery, capabilities, task, safety, navigation, communication, and privacy, with user priorities of these items varying across a small ground robot, a large ground robot, and an aerial robot.