Helping robots imitate

Acknowledgment of, and adaptation to, the robot’s feedback to a human task demonstration

Aris Alissandrakis | Dept. of Computational Intelligence & Systems Science Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science & Engineering Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Dag Sverre Syrdal | Adaptive Systems Research Group School of Computer Science University of Hertfordshire, UK

Yoshihiro Miyake | Dept. of Computational Intelligence & Systems Science Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science & Engineering Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Towards informing the design of more ‘natural’ (non-expert) human–robot interaction (HRI) systems, this chapter presents two studies, focusing on a scenario where a human has to teach a robot how to perform an everyday household task.The first study considered the humans’ acknowledgment of feedback from a robot, to which they had to demonstrate how to do a task. The research questions were if (and how) the participants would modify their teaching instructions when the robot stated a misunderstanding, and whether they would remain consistent for the remainder of the task.In the second study, the robot feedback increased in complexity, in order to elaborate on what the human had demonstrated. The research question was if the participants, based on the robot feedback, would be able to resolve any misunderstandings by modifying their teaching instructions.Besides illustrating that people express a wide variety of teaching behaviors when faced with the task of demonstrating to a robot, the results from the second study support our design suggestion that robots should actively and accurately advertise their cognitive and manipulative capabilities via form (appearance) and function (behavior) to improve the dialogic interaction.

Published online: 21 December 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/ais.2.03ali

Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

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2014. Full-Body Postural Control of a Humanoid Robot with Both Imitation Learning and Skill Innovation. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics 11:02 ► pp. 1450012 ff.

Pitsch, Karola, Anna-Lisa Vollmer, Katharina J. Rohlfing, Jannik Fritsch & Britta Wrede

2014. Tutoring in adult-child interaction. Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems 15:1 ► pp. 55 ff.

Weiss, Astrid & Katta Spiel

2022. Robots beyond Science Fiction: mutual learning in human–robot interaction on the way to participatory approaches. AI & SOCIETY 37:2 ► pp. 501 ff.

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