Crafting with a Robot Assistant: Use Social Cues to Inform Adaptive Handovers in Human-Robot Collaboration

TL;DR

This study explores how social cues and task context can improve human-robot handovers during crafting activities, using a new dataset from a Wizard-of-Oz experiment to inform adaptive collaboration.

Contribution

It introduces the FACT HRC dataset and demonstrates how social cues and context enhance coordination in human-robot handovers during creative and functional tasks.

Findings

Social cues influence handover timing and positioning.

Task context affects collaboration dynamics.

Dataset enables further research in adaptive human-robot interaction.

Abstract

We study human-robot handovers in a naturalistic collaboration scenario, where a mobile manipulator robot assists a person during a crafting session by providing and retrieving objects used for wooden piece assembly (functional activities) and painting (creative activities). We collect quantitative and qualitative data from 20 participants in a Wizard-of-Oz study, generating the Functional And Creative Tasks Human-Robot Collaboration dataset (the FACT HRC dataset), available to the research community. This work illustrates how social cues and task context inform the temporal-spatial coordination in human-robot handovers, and how human-robot collaboration is shaped by and in turn influences people's functional and creative activities.