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Evaluating the Effectiveness of Nonverbal Communication in Human-Robot Interaction

Published: 01 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Impact of verbal instructions and deictic gestures of a cobot on the performance of human coworkers2024 IEEE-RAS 23rd International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)10.1109/Humanoids58906.2024.10769925(1040-1047)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024
  • (2022)The Design and Observed Effects of Robot-performed Manual Gestures: A Systematic ReviewACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/354953012:1(1-62)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2022
  • (2022)WISARD: Weight Informing Soft Artificial Robotic Dermis2022 IEEE 5th International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)10.1109/RoboSoft54090.2022.9762174(1-8)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '20: Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
March 2020
702 pages
ISBN:9781450370578
DOI:10.1145/3371382
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. guide robot
  2. joint-activity
  3. kinesics
  4. nonverbal cues

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Overall Acceptance Rate 192 of 519 submissions, 37%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Impact of verbal instructions and deictic gestures of a cobot on the performance of human coworkers2024 IEEE-RAS 23rd International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)10.1109/Humanoids58906.2024.10769925(1040-1047)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024
  • (2022)The Design and Observed Effects of Robot-performed Manual Gestures: A Systematic ReviewACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/354953012:1(1-62)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2022
  • (2022)WISARD: Weight Informing Soft Artificial Robotic Dermis2022 IEEE 5th International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)10.1109/RoboSoft54090.2022.9762174(1-8)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2022

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