ARDIE: AR, Dialogue, and Eye Gaze Policies for Human-Robot Collaboration

TL;DR

ARDIE is a novel system integrating augmented reality, dialogue, and eye gaze cues to improve human-robot collaboration by enhancing shared situational awareness and communication.

Contribution

The paper introduces ARDIE, a multi-modal framework combining AR, natural language, and eye gaze within a decision theoretic model for improved HRC.

Findings

Enhanced scene understanding through AR visualizations

Improved human-robot communication efficiency

Effective visualization of future object interactions

Abstract

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has become increasingly relevant in industrial, household, and commercial settings. However, the effectiveness of such collaborations is highly dependent on the human and robots' situational awareness of the environment. Improving this awareness includes not only aligning perceptions in a shared workspace, but also bidirectionally communicating intent and visualizing different states of the environment to enhance scene understanding. In this paper, we propose ARDIE (Augmented Reality with Dialogue and Eye Gaze), a novel intelligent agent that leverages multi-modal feedback cues to enhance HRC. Our system utilizes a decision theoretic framework to formulate a joint policy that incorporates interactive augmented reality (AR), natural language, and eye gaze to portray current and future states of the environment. Through object-specific AR renders, the human can visualize future object interactions to make adjustments as needed, ultimately providing an interactive and efficient collaboration between humans and robots.