Toward Human-Robot Interaction Design through Human-Human Interaction Experiment Yutaka Hiroi 1 and Akinori Ito 2 Faculty of Engineering, Osaka Institute of Technology, 5-16-1 Omiya, Asahi-ku, Osaka, Japan 2 Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University, 6-6-05 Aramaki aza Aoba, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Japan 1
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[email protected] [email protected]
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Abstract. In this paper, we examined a possibility of assessing a human’s impression of a behavior of a robot through a human-human interaction (HHI), that enables us to design a robot’s behavior without actually implementing that behavior to the robot. Experiments were conducted for comparing users’ impressions of human-robot interaction (HRI) and HHI. We employed paperscissors-rock (janken) game as a task of interaction. Virtual reality technology was used for realizing the robot’s behavior. From the experimental result, we observed significant difference for the impression of friendliness, but we could observe no significant difference for other items. The result suggests that the behavior of a robot can be assessed through HHI. Keywords: human-robot interaction; human-machine interaction; interaction design; virtual reality
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Introduction
Designing how a robot interacts to a human is an important part of robotic design, especially for a robot that has a social role [1]. Not only designs of physical property [2,3] or appearance [4] of a robot but also design of its behavior [5] is a very important issue. On designing a robot including its interaction, iterative improvement of its design through a field test is indispensable. However, it is costly to construct a number of prototype robots for evaluating robot design. Therefore, we have proposed a method for evaluating an appearance of a robot using augmented reality technology [6]. In this paper, we investigate how an impression of a human-robot interaction (HRI) can be assessed through human-human interaction (HHI) experiment and virtual reality. Our final goal is to obtain a design strategy of HRI through an observation of HHI augmented by a computer graphics. If a user’s impressions from HRI and HHI are similar, it suggests that an HRI could be designed by observing an HHI of the same task, which means that we could avoid building many robots with different
behavior. If a human-robot interaction experiment can be substituted by a humanhuman experiment, we can save huge amount of time and money when developing an interaction robot. To this end, we investigated similarity between a user’s impressions by an HRI and an HHI of the same task.
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Experimental Paradigm
In this work, we chose a “paper-scissors-rock” (janken) game as a task of interaction [7]. A subject (a player) is asked to play janken game with a robot or a human (a partner), and answered a questionnaire for surveying impressions of the interactions to the robot and human. While playing, we displayed the partner’s next hand around the partner’s figure using an augmented reality. Figure 1 shows an example of a partner robot playing with a player. The next hand (“paper” in this case) is displayed in a balloon. We conducted two sessions for each player. In the first session, the balloon shows the user the partner’s next hand; in the second session, the partner throws a different hand from that previously shown in the balloon as a “betrayal” behavior. This betrayal is introduced for investigating whether the betrayal behavior affects the impression on the partner. Keyboard
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HMD
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Marker
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Partner
Fig.2. Arrangement of the experiments. Fig. 1. An example of a partner (robot)
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Experimental Setup
The experiments were conducted in a room. Figure 2 shows the arrangement of the experiment. A player wore a head-mounted display (VUZIX iWare VX920) and sat on a chair. The player used a keyboard with a paper/scissors/rock mark for throwing a
hand. The marker is used to generate the balloon using the AR. The ARToolkit [8] was used for overlaying the generated image onto the captured image. First, an experiment was carried out employing a human partner. The subjects were 8 male students who are from 20 to 22 years old. These subjects were employed as players. We explained them the experiment and made agreement with the subjects. After that, the above-mentioned two sessions were conducted for each subject in this order. The janken plays were performed according to calls made by the partner. Next, an experiment for robot partner was conducted. In this experiment, the subjects were 8 male students who are from 21 to 22 years old, who were different from those of the previous experiment. The robot had only body and arms; its hands and head were generated using virtual reality [5] to realize hands for janken and facial expression. Same as the previous experiment, the janken play were performed according to the partner robot’s call, as which a synthesized voice was used. The questionnaire sent to the subjects had the following four evaluations, in which a subject scored on a one-to-seven scale, as well as its reason. How did you feel the partner trustworthy? How did you feel the partner serious? How did you feel the partner friendly? How did you feel the partner kind?
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Results and Discussion 7 6
Average score
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Robot Human
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Trustworthy
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Friendly
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Fig.3. Result of the questionnaire.
Figure 3 shows the experimental result. In this result, scores of a question are averaged. We conducted Student’s t-test for comparison of scores for the robot and human partner, and we observed statistically significant difference between human and robot partner for only “friendliness” question (p
